When I first learned about Project Gutenberg many years ago, I was astonished that so many e-books are available in the public domain. I remember downloading many of these classic literature e-books from Project Gutenberg and reading them on my computer. I stopped only when my eyes started to suffer.
While so much text information is available on the Internet, we cannot read it all because of the health reasons and the comfort issues. But at the same the audio versions of these e-books, called audio-books are very popular. We can download audio books on our phone and listen to them anywhere we go. Imagine finishing the complete works of Charles Dickens through audio-books while commuting to work everyday.
While Project Gutenberg has started to provide audio-books for many e-books, there are so many e-books which are available only in the TXT and the HTML file format. With the help of a small tool called Vovsoft Text to MP3 Converter, we can convert any text matter into MP3 or WAV audio file formats. This is done through the TTS engine which comes with Windows itself.
Vovsoft Text to MP3 Converter is available as a portable application and we can use it without installing. But it depends on the TTS engine and the TTS voices. For professional TTS voices, you can search the Nuance website https://www.nuance.com/.
In the Text to MP3 Converter window, we have to copy-paste the text snippets into the text window. We can select the voice engine and the audio sampling rate. We can also customize the voice pitch and the speech speed. We can also choose the volume level.
For listening to the audio, we can click on the “Speak” button. For saving the audio files we can click on the “Save” button and choose either as MP3 or WAV formats. These saved audio files can be played on any device using any audio player.
You can download Vovsoft Text to MP3 Converter from https://vovsoft.com/software/text-to-mp3-converter/.