Have you ever needed to convert a text file into a MP3 audio file? Well even if you haven’t, now you can using Zamzar.com. Zamzar is a cool service that I wrote about a long time ago that lets you convert between many different file types for free.
You can convert a PDF to DOC, DOC to HTML, PDF to Image and lots more. You can also convert between different audio (AAC, MP3, WAV, etc) and video (AVI, MPEG, MP4, etc) formats.
Now you can convert a text file into an MP3! Just select your text file, type in your email and choose Convert! I tried it out on a test file with the following text:
This is a test to see how well it converts this to MP3 format!
It converted it in less than a minute and I was able to download the MP3 file to my computer! People have complained in the past that it takes Zamzar a long time to convert files, especially PDF to anything and I’m guessing it’s because they have tons every day.
As of right now, though, it’s converting text to audio very quickly! And I have to say that the audio quality and pronunciation was very good. Of course, the sentence above is not very convoluted or hard to speak, so it’s not a great test, but if you have a simple text document without a lot of fancy words, the conversion should sound good.
Go ahead and give it a shot on one of your text documents to see how you like it. I’ve also tested that it converts Word, PDF, and OpenDocument files to MP3 also.
After more testing, it seems the voice can be a bit fast when reading certain lines of text. Also, there are places where it completely gets the word wrong, but that is to be expected.
You can also check out a service called iSpeech which converts text to audio also and does a very good job, but it’s not free. It’s cool though if you have sight problems (visually impaired) and want to have everything on your computer read to you.
You can either type in text and have it read out to you, upload any type of file and have it converted to audio, or paste in any URL and have the text converted.
And that’s it! So hopefully if you ever need these types of services and don’t want to download a full-blown application, you can get your work done with ease. Enjoy!
yoo. attractive post!
eh.. cognitively thoughts.
hmm.. really like this post )