From OCR to MP3 - Here's How!

TopOCR will allow you to generate voice output from the text that TopOCR generated from your images. You can then use a free software MP3 Encoder to take the audio output and encode it as MP3 and listen to it on your portable audio player.

Requirements

  • SAPI 5.1 - This is already a standard component in Windows XP, if you have an earlier release of windows you will need to go here and download "SpeechSDK5.1".
  • cwenc - A free MP3 encoding utility, written by Mikkel Elmholdt and is available here: (968KB). Cwenc can take the .WAV file created from TopOCR and and convert it to an MP3 file which you can then copy to your portable MP3 player. Due to licensing and patent issues, TopSoft cannot directly add the MP3 encoding directly into TopOCR.

MP3 Encoding Process

The actual process is pretty simple. After you finished OCR of an image and cleaned-up the text in the editor, just press the "TextToSpeech" menu button in the text window. This will bring up the TextToSpeech Dialog. Click on the "Save to .wav" button and save the .wav file. Then run the cwenc MP3 encoder and open the .wav file that TopOCR just created and then encode it as an MP3 file. Congratulations, you have just converted your portable audio player into an eBook reader!

From OCR to Audio CD - Here's How!

Even your old CD player can now be an eBook reader! To copy the .WAV audio output file from TopOCR onto a recordable CD which can then be played in any Audio CD player, do the following:

  • In Windows Explorer, choose the files that you want to copy to the audio CD, and then click the Copy to Audio CD task.
  • In Windows Media Player, verify that the files that you wish to copy are in the playlist and that they are selected.
  • Click "Copy Music", and that's it!