Requirements

• Mac OS X 10.2.2 or newer

Purpose

This is an applescript application that converts a given text file to mp3. Useful for creating audiobooks from ebooks, listening to lecture notes on the go, etc. It employs the default Mac OS X speech synthesizer for text-to-speech and a bundled universal binary of LAME v3.98 for mp3 conversion.

Implementation

The default Mac OS X speech synthesizer will generate uncompressed AIFF files that can get rather large if the given text file is long (ex. a book). To avoid this, the applescript processes each paragraph in the text individually: reading a given paragraph to AIFF, immediately converting to a temporary mp3 file and deleting the AIFF file before moving on to reading the next paragraph. After all paragraphs are read, the temporary mp3 files are concatenated into a single final mp3 file and the temporary files are deleted.

Update

As of version 5, you can now select multiple text files for conversion (yields one mp3 file for each selected text file).

Note on first-run performance | Tips for fine-tuning audio output | Remember play position in iTunes and iPods/iPhones | Other works included