On Sunday, May 20, 2007 9:46 PM,
Paul Erkens happened to mention in passing:

> Hi O N J,
>
> You pointed us to a rockbox voice archive that you maintain, which of
> course drew my attention and interest. A question about this.
>
> All voice files there have the word voice, and a date. Does this mean
> that the voice files themselves, more specifically the english.voice
> file, changes so frequently that each file posted there, is a different
> version that follows the rockbox builds as they develop?
>
> Second, I downloaded one just to see what it would contain, but it is a
> .7z file, for which nor windows nor winrar has no unpacker. Would it be
> possible to distribute whatever you have online in a more widely used
> format, like zip or rar? Knowing you from the net, there is likely a
> good reason why you chose to do it this way. Can you explain or change
> it? Curious to hear about this.
>
> Paul.

Hello Paul Erkens, the format of the voice archives is 7z which is a very
good and free archiver called 7zip. www.7zip.org will decompress these
files, as will later versions of WinRar.
I would change, but I like the format, and after extensive testing, 7z
compresses my voices more than any other archiver I have personally tried.
I do not know if even in this day and age, there are still those on a dialup
connection, but I have opted for being perhaps rather unorthodox in my
choice of compression methods so that everyone has as less download time as
possible. With zip copies of my voices the file size is anywhere between 1
and 2 megabites larger than at present.

To answer your other question, the date on the voice files changes in
accordance with the build info on the front page of www.rockbox.org whenever
english.lang is changed or updated.
For example I saw earlier that english.lang was updated, so tomorrow there
will be a new voice archive which will have the date and the 7 voices that
I make every day. I do not upload the new voices every day as I stated,
because some days there is just no point, however the build process goes
ahead at 06:30 BST regardless, as I have a script to do this.
For those interested in making their own voices, the script is available
from the same site where my voice files can be downloaded.
Also, since some on this list do use my voices, check tomorrow during your
day for a new voice archive as there will be one.
Thanks.
Received on 2007-05-21