AZSlow

AZ Controller plug-in for Cakewalk SONAR => Tutorials => Topic started by: azslow3 on July 20, 2015, 02:42:23 PM

Title: Sonar's Speech
Post by: azslow3 on July 20, 2015, 02:42:23 PM
Note: available since v0.4r1b267
Note: you will need 2 sound cards to use that feature or other way to use default windows sound system in parallel with Sonar. You should be able for example play YouTube while Sonar is in focus.

Most of us are using display to understand what is going on in Sonar. Some control surfaces have displays and/or LEDs which duplicate the information. But in some cases all that is not an option. For example when you try to work with Sonar using control surfaces without indication (Digital Piano or StudioMix in my case).

I was a bit surprised that my Window 8 default installation has TTS (Text To Speech) engine installed and ready to use. So with modern system the preset I attach to this post should work out of the box. But as noted at the beginning, you should be able to listen system sounds/internet videos while running Sonar. You can configure the audio device TTS is using as well as the voice and speed from Windows Control Panel.

The preset should say the strip name and either it is mutes/soloed/record armed every time you change the focus. For example "Guitar muted". There is a possibility to insert "is" into the sentence, to form proper English statements, but that is not done in this preset to keep it simple.

Internally, the preset is collecting the information in separate Monitors and saves the result either in the Text Buffer (strip name) or in the State Set (for the rest) and then compose final text.