The patron saint of financial analysts is Pete Sherriff
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Text audio convertor gives Vole chance to chat
Essentially Magnetic Time, or MT as it's known to its friends, converts Word documents and Outlook emails to MP3s and sticks them on your iPod, mobile phone or PDA. I can see a handful of markets that might find this very useful.
First and foremost has to be the busy corporate type, who can then turn valuable hours away from a screen into productive working time. Similarly, students can convert lectures or notes into audio to listen to while out and about. Lastly, this product could be a great idea for those with learning or visual difficulties. For instance a dyslexic may find it a lot easier to listen to their emails rather than reading them.
In its present incarnation, MT appears to be somewhat limited as it only supports email from Outlook or Outlook Express and Word documents, but as the majority of people use these programs for email and word processing this isn't as big a deal as it may first appear.
It is clear that the designers have gone through a lot of trouble to make sure MT is as easy to use as possible. Once you've got it up and running, most of the process is fairly automatic. Installation is completely standard and after entering your licence details you go through the basic set up. Set up involves all the usual stuff you'd expect such as selecting an email profile, and if you use more than one, selecting default output folders and so on.
The default voice is pretty decent, she sounds quite human albeit a little odd at times when she tries to create more complex words or join strange syllables together. If you find that she mispronounces a word you can email Magnetic Time for them to fix it in upcoming patches. The sound quality is impressive, especially when you consider the size if the files created.
There are different versions of the program depending on whether you use an
iPod, mobile or PDA. All versions can output the file to a specific directory, which means you can in fact take the MP3
and transfer it to any device you like. However, the particular versions make it easier to synchronise the files with
that particular device, for example the iPod version fires up iTunes and adds the file there so it automatically
uploads to your iPod the next time you connect it.
Converting word documents is a ridiculously simple task. You can either fire up the document in Word and click the MagneticTime icon to export it, or you just do a simple search from MT itself. You can also create a queue of as many files as you like if you want to convert more than one file at a time. You simply click the button to convert to whichever device you've decided on and let it do its thing.
Converting emails is just as simple. When you install MT it creates a new
folder in your email client called MagneticTime and creates a rule to copy all incoming email into that folder. Any
email in that folder then appears in MT and you can select which emails you want to convert, click the convert button
and watch it go to work. Should you not wish all your mail to be copied into MagneticTime folder you can create new
rules to decide what should be copied over while your inbox is receiving email.
The program also has an inbuilt player so you can listen to the files on your PC as well.
With the default settings, an average four page Word document took about 20 seconds to convert and created a 1.86 MB MP3 file, so there you could easily fit plenty of documents and emails onto an iPod or other MP3 player.
CONCLUSION
This product isn't going to storm the world, but it has its place and it does the job well. More compatibility
would be nice, for instance with other email clients and with other document formats such as PDF, but I'm sure we'll
see more and more of that as development continues.
The product is available now for download from the Magnetic Time website for the reasonably modest price of $39.99. ?
L'INQ
MagneticTime
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