Tag: audio

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Using XML, PHP and Festival to Produce a “Radio” Play

You play the play with two files: an XML data file that contains the play itself and a producer script in PHP. The XML data contains the cast list, the title and credits, a list of files to use for effects, and each character’s lines (the dialogue). The producer renders the play to an audio device according to the instructions in the XML data, which makes it easy to create a different play or edit the current one and play it with the same producer.

IBM Developerworks::Produce 60-second radio theatre with XML, PHP and Festival.

This is pretty crazy. An XML version of a script is feed to the Festival TTS engine resulting in a an audio file of the play. Some interesting ideas come to mind like automated newscasts, not to mention the revival of the radio drama as a techno art form.

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Video, Audio Tags Scrapped From HTML5, Evil Prevails

The latest rewrite of the Web’s mother tongue won’t recommend the use of specific audio and video encoding formats that could make it cheaper and easier for people to distribute multimedia content.

The major browser makers have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, wrote Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

via Browser vendor squabbles cause W3C to scrap codec requirement | Developer World – InfoWorld.

Just in case anyone needed reminding about whose side the browser makers are really on (that would be their own). Thing is this wasn’t some sort of complicated technical thing, just a matter of a bit of compromise that would benefit all users. Seems there’ll be none of that. Every vendor seems to have dug in until it just became too troublesome to resolve. We all lose. Sad.