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Apologies for spamming the forum, but after spending more time to experiment with Narrator, I've come across a few features that I think could be improved and/or added in future versions, and which I hope others may find useful.
One thing I would like to see would be a better way of organizing characters for complex projects that may involve large casts, such as lengthy stories, plays, or even novels. It would be nice to be able to group them into folders, or some sort of user-defined hierarchy so that they would be easier to access when assigning parts. For example, someone could divide characters by age or gender, or in my case, as I like to make variations of the same character to enhance expression, I could group those together into a folder to avoid confusion later on. The same could also be said of chapter divisions; for example, a novel with long chapters could be subdivided into scenes and grouped together, as with a play with acts and scenes.
Another feature I would appreciate, perhaps above all, would be a way to save "favorite" characters/voices in a kind of bank for easy access later on. This would be especially useful for someone who may work on separate documents that recycle the same voices, so that he/she wouldn't have to spend time to adjust the parameters again and run the risk of not getting it quite right the second time around. Since I like to work with many variations of the same character, i.e. adjusting pitch and rate, to express different emotions (well, as best as voice synthesis technology can), I would really like to see a way of saving the voices I like best and then being able to refer back to them later. In addition, a way of making variations of a voice by duplicating an existing voice and then tweaking it from there would also be extremely helpful.
Just a few suggestions from a humble new user. :) Thanks again for making Narrator a fun, easy-to-use, and innovative application! Keep up the great work.
Re: Feature Request: Groups, Favorite Characters
Groups of characters and actors is definitely a good idea. Something I considered, but decided to skip for now to keep things simple. But if I get requests for it, I'll consider adding that in a future version.
As for variations of characters for different moods etc, and saving favorite characters for multiple documents, those are also both features I considered when designing the version 2 upgrade, and have in fact added groundwork for adding in a future version. My idea was to have an "Actors" preference page, where you could set up a range of voice settings, then those would appear as options in the characters area, instead of the simple voices as now. I would also make the characters into groups, with "moods" below each for the voice variations. Again, I decided to skip that for 2.0 in the name of simplicity (and to get it out in a timely manor), but will likely implement in a future version.
Thanks for the suggestions. Feedback is always welcome!
Feature request: search-and-replace in transcript window
I'm really missing the usual text-editor "search and replace" functionality when working with transcripts in Transana. It would be invaluable for replacing real people's names with pseudonyms, changing the speaker-labeling convention, etc.I can copy text out and paste it into my favorite text editor, do the search/replace there, and copy/paste back to Transana, but this messes up time codes. And I'd be real nervous about it even with an application that supports RTF and in theory will preserve time codes. In my experience, time codes are very fragile things.
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oliviaharis
New Cars
Re: Feature request: search-and-replace in transcript window
Narrator does support find and replace in the rich text area. Simply click in it to make it active, then do Cmd-F to display the find and replace window.
Saving Favorate Characters
I know I'm more then a year late to this, but...
While I can't speak to folders and such there is a way to save and set exact values using Applescript and Universal Access (assistive devices) in 10.5 (not tested for 10.6). You first need to enable assistive devices from the Universal Access in system preferences.
Get Slider Values: copy the following code into a new Applescript and run while Narrator is open. Change the Untitled to the name of your document, make sure it is in the parentheses. This will get the slide values of the current Actor and copy them into the clip board so you can paste them into text document and save it.
activate application "Narrator"tell application "System Events"
tell process "Narrator"
-- Rate Slider
set Nrate to get value of value indicator 1 of slider 1 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" -- 50 to 500
-- Pitch Slider
set Npitch to get value of value indicator 1 of slider 3 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" -- 20 to 80
-- Inflection Slider
set Ninflection to get value of value indicator 1 of slider 2 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" -- 0 to 200
-- Volume Slider
set Nvolume to get value of slider 4 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" -- 0 to 1 by decimal
end tell
end tell
tell application "Narrator"
display dialog "Rate: " & Nrate & return & "Pitch: " & Npitch & return & "Inflection: " & Ninflection & return & "Volume: " & Nvolume
set the clipboard to "Rate: " & Nrate & return & "Pitch: " & Npitch & return & "Inflection: " & Ninflection & return & "Volume: " & Nvolume as text
end tell
Set Slider Values: Like the Get you can use this script to set the slider values to specific values. Sorry I don't have a nice GUI or way to read from a saved text file yet but you can set the values
-- Change the values after the 'to', use the given ranges.
set Nrate to 50 -- 50 to 500
set Npitch to 20 -- 20 to 80
set Ninflection to 0 -- 0 to 200
set Nvolume to 0 -- 0 to 1 by decimal, example 0.5 is half volume
activate application "Narrator"
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Narrator"
-- Rate Slider
set value of value indicator 1 of slider 1 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" to Nrate -- 50 to 500
-- Pitch Slider
set value of value indicator 1 of slider 3 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" to Npitch -- 20 to 80
-- Inflection Slider
set value of value indicator 1 of slider 2 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" to Ninflection -- 0 to 200
-- Volume Slider
set value of slider 4 of splitter group 1 of splitter group 1 of window "Untitled" to Nvolume -- 0 to 1 by decimal
end tell
end tell
As soon as I get a cleaned up and more GUI based script setup I'll post or link it. Best of luck.