Where are VoiceOver voices stored/can I change voice in the terminal?

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Where are VoiceOver voices stored/can I change voice in the terminal?

Hi,

I let a friend borrow my old Macbook, and she's being faced with an iTunes crash every time she plugs in her iPod. After lengthy Skype screen-sharing debugging (i.e. this whole thing is a pain- I'm half the world away) I've discovered that it's somehow connected to the VoiceOver framework- the crash log shows it failing on "MacinTalkSynthesizer". It turns out that she gets the exact same crash upon running VoiceOver Utility, or opening the Speech panel of System Preferences. Using 'say' in Terminal returns 'bus error' and no speech.

I know the simplest answer to this is an Archive and Install, but she doesn't have the install DVDs (woops) and wouldn't entirely know what she was doing anyway. I'm hoping that the errors are all somehow related to the voice files becoming corrupted... but I can't find out for the life of me where they're stored. Anyone know? Also, is it possible to change my selected voice (she doesn't have VoiceOver enabled, but I assume the default voice is selected) by the Terminal? I'm hoping that changing voice and/or reinstalling the voice files (that I could e-mail over, we're both on 10.5.8) will fix the problem.

Macbook 2GHz, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Jan 24, 2010 4:27 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 27, 2010 11:47 AM in response to chocky

The voices are stored in System->Library–>Speech–>Voices. Most of them are quite compact files.

However, the usual default system voice from Leopard onwards, Alex, weighs 400 MB. That is quite some attachment to e-mail…

Voices from third parties, e.g. Infovox iVox, are stored in Library—>Speech—>Voices.

I'm not at all sure that trying to replace the voice folder would fix the problem. I suspect it's corruption right inside the OS — and if that is corrupt, what else is damaged as well?

To be perfectly honest, wouldn't it be simplest just to bite the bullet and stump up the $29 for the Snow Leopard upgrade? That way, your friend would have a much leaner, faster MacBook, and a stable operating system into the bargain.

Good luck!

Archie

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