My husband uses Mac's text to audio file function when he needs to read long documents. It doesn't seem to be working with High Sierra though - has anyone else had success?
I access the text to audio file function by opening a document in Word or Pages, selecting all of the text and then going to Word (or Pages)>Services>Add to iTunes as Spoken Track.
The first time I tried this it created a 20 second long AIFF track. Given that the doc was +20 pages, 20 second was quite mean!
I think it's a problem with High Sierra. I've called Apple Support to flag this up with them but just wanted to see if anyone else had the same problem and perhaps has a solution.
Thanks.
Seo
Comments
Hi Seo, I am having this same
Hi Seo, I am having this same issue! I don't know specifically what the issue is. It definitely seems related specifically to High Sierra. Either something going on with the operating system, or something going on with the new hard drive file system (APFS). But either way I'm having the same problem. The only way I can get it to work is to do much smaller chunks of text at a time. For example, if I'm in Microsoft Word, I've noticed that I can select somewhere between 1,700 to 3,000ish words and run the process and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If it's only giving you like 20 seconds, go into Activity Monitor, and find the process called "com.apple.speech.speechsynthesisd" and force quit it. Then run the exact same thing again and sometimes it'll work. I noticed that there seem to be arbitrary points where it just stops. So if I notice that the most I'm ever getting is, say, 3 minutes of audio, I'll find that stopping point in the text and just select up until that point, force quit the process, and run it again and it will complete.
It was such a pain to do it this way that I eventually went back to an old MacBook Pro that I still have and ran the process there. On that Mac, I could take 100 pages of text, select it, and it would create a nice 2 hour long mp3 file in less than a minute.
I don't know what's happening but I would LOVE to see a fix!!
Hope this is helpful somehow. At least you know you're not alone!
-Gabe
it's a big. I turn off
it's a big. I turn off voiceover before envoking any of that stuff. The bug will even happen in the book to speach app. I thought i reported this when the os first launched but apparently it still is not fixed.