Really?
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2026 5:48 pm
I was searching for TTS voices, and found that the ones I have had for years are coming back around. My original bitch with TTS is the lack of care in the voice fonts, I would often run the finished audiobook through audition to remove the spikes, etch, they were bad, most all of them, but the upgraded version voice fonts have been worked over and new engines are driving them. And, several different companies are taking these stock voice fonts, keeping the original voice names, and working them as their own
Anyway, I ran into Cepstral page, recently put up, version 4.2 with the keys and cracking, After downloading all that, and reminiscing on all the times loading them into a new machine one by one, with all hassle, I then found that Cepstral is on version 6.2.3.891 and are giving them away as freeware, no more hacking the licensing. Well, I had a couple of voices on that which I really liked, and now I get to revisit them.
Anyway, after going through the virtual school with 98, and 2000, I decided to put them aside and stick with Windows XP, as it will, as they say, run everything without the hassle. So, new machine, new and better voices, enough characters so that one does not get into a bind when voicing out a project. And maybe some day, as now some are making expression tags for the voices, I will upgrade my own program for turning them into mp3. My last version is Reader2020, that is the last time I did a little messing around with the program as the original is Reader2013, which some of my boxes still run.