Text2Tape Lite

Text2Tape is an utility that lets you convert text files into audio recordings. The application uses Mac's built-in text-to-speech engine for the conversion.

The system's default text-to-speech voice is used in the conversion, but you can change that from the settings. Text2Tape can be downloaded for free from the Mac App Store.

There are two supported output formats: AAC and AIFF. AAC is compressed, which translates to smaller files. On the other hand, AIFF has no compression whatsoever, so the files will be considerably bigger.

The main window consists of two panes, one for each of the output formats. To start a conversion, you have to choose which one of those formats you want to use and then tell the application what file you want to convert. Text2Tape supports the following formats: TXT, RTF, DOC, DOCX, XML, HTML, and ODT.

In my testing, I converted a .DOC file that had a single paragraph in it. The whole conversion process took a little over 15 seconds. This tells me that converting a long text will be a long process. The quality of the resulting audio recording was what I expected. It was OK, but it wasn't smooth at all. It is a machine reading, after all. You wouldn't want to listen to a complete book read aloud by Alex.