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• Post #4421022

  Several years ago, I posted a recording of my local NOAA Weather Radio station having no weather observations to report. This still occasionally happens. Here's a better recording of it, directly from a weather radio instead of an online stream. This was captured at 3:59 am on May 18, 2026.

• Post #4421021

  For a while I've been looking for a newer version of Chinese IBMTTS's CHSrom.dll, in case there were further changes or bug fixes made after IBMTTS 6.7.3.2. It continues to be very elusive. The concatenative builds of version 7.0 don't have it, because they switched to an entirely different romanizer engine which is incompatible with the formant synth, although they do include a May 2005 build of chs50.syn. I found a file named viavoice_cn.exe which supposedly installs a...

• Post #4421020

  Yesterday I managed to create probably the biggest Phonetones changelog entry I've ever written so far. A lot of recent submissions had folders that were duplicated in the phone folders themselves, that is, Galaxy-S7>Galaxy-S7>contents, and I spent an hour or so cleaning it up.

• Post #4336085

  Pantech. A company that was primarily known for making budget phones in the US, but had a solid market in South Korea. This company's sound team is probably one of the strangest I've seen. Nearly all of their ringtones are pure shitposts. As far as I can tell, this was completely intentional. Pantech could absolutely ship beautiful, high quality ringtones. But most of the time they chose not to. Here's a selection of my favorite alarms and ringtones from one phone, the Pantech P990 D...

• Post #2941389

  Just for fun, I tried downgrading from IBMTTS 7.0 back to 6.7.4.2 to see if the experience was as bad as I remembered. It still is. The speech rate and pitch reset to default in the first few minutes, and scrolling through text quickly is still a one way road to Crashville. IBMTTS 7.0 fixed all that. Unfortunately it's seemingly exclusive to obscure Windows WebSphere Voice Toolkit packages, and no one sold it anywhere.

• Post #2941388

  I've bought two notable retro things over the past year. A Roland SC-8850 synthesizer, and a Franklin LM6000SE talking dictionary. They've both turned out to be early buggy units. I hope this doesn't become a trend lol

• Post #2485693

  Wow I just managed to.... completely and utterly break IBM Watson's Text-to-Speech. I did it by typing "`[M????????????????????????????]" repeatedly. This is a combination of two phonemes. The "M" used in the word "hmm", followed by a bunch of question marks, which represent the quiet t sound in words like "button," "rotten," etc.

• Post #2182112

  A couple years ago, Marcus Groeber published the source code for the first version of the TALKS (then TALX) screen reader for the Nokia 9110 Communicator, available at https://github.com/mgroeber9110/talx9110. In 2025 the repository was updated with a YouTube demonstration of the screen reader in action. It's interesting to hear how it all began. https://youtu.be/JWeZizVsjlU

• Post #2166763

  Weee, got my first ever music box! This isn't the first one I've seen (I've seen smaller ones before) but this is the first one I've had myself. This one is a musical teapot. If you wind it, it plays a short clip of an old 1920s song named Tea for Two,, and putting it down presses a button that stops it. Here's a demo of it. The original song is composed by Vincent Youmans, with lyrics by Irving Caesar. Performance available at https://www.youtube.com/watc...

• Post #1138423

  I recently added this to my profile, but making a post about it as well. You may mention me here if you want to occasionally submit ringtones to Phonetones. But if you plan to submit packs often, please join the ROMphonix Discord server and send them there. https://discord.gg/83qJNqt48c

• Post #979501

  The Roland SC-88Pro's sound engine has an interesting bug. If the Cheese Saw 2 patch is played at a high enough velocity, a scream sound is added to it. This was fixed on the SC-8850/20, and apparently a fix was available for the 88Pro as well, but I'm not sure how common it was for people to apply it. My SC-88ST Pro still has the bug. Here's a demonstration of it.

• Post #979498

  I found the German version of IBMTTS 6.4.0.6, released August 1, 2002. It was on a Czech PCWorld CD from 2004 of all things, in a CAB file named tts_ge.cab. IBMTTS 6.4.0.6 notably fixed the scratchy sound that was re-introduced a few months earlier in 6.4.0.3, but I've only managed to find it in Finnish, French, German and Castillian Spanish.

• Post #718804

  Lol the 2006 version of beSTspeech almost fixes the pronunciation of stickybeak. Instead of sticky-fingered, it's pronounced as sticky-bick. Probably a typo, the e sound of beak and the i of pick are assigned to the same letter in the phonemes, i, and they may have accidentally capitalized it.

• Post #358375

  Well this is... probably one of the most chaotic Sound Canvas MIDI compositions I've seen. File name: arm_daue. Internal title: DAUERND ( NUCLEAR GEAR ) Composed by ARM. MIDI: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1xNt1LCeRM6ikb5ZH0G94X7hLuiEGNehA. Original LZH: https://web.archive.org/web/20181002140654if_/http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown-Dice/4515/arm_daue.LZH.