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Originally Posted by agentx216
With the most recent release of Calibre (7.18.0), I seem to have lost the icon for TTS to MP3. It appears to still be installed in the Plugins list but I can't access it nor can I uninstall it to reinstall it. Anyone have a shortcut to it or experiencing this as well?
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It looks like this plugin is a casualty of this updated feature in calibre v7.18
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E-book viewer: Read aloud: A new Text-to-Speech engine (Piper) that uses a neural network for realistic sounding voices
To use it access the viewer controls and click the Read aloud button or press 'Ctrl+S'. The neural network is run locally, no cloud services are used. Using the OS Text-to-Speech engine is still possible by clicking the configure button on the Read aloud control bar. Note that the new engine highlights the currently read sentence rather than word.
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At first glance it seems the underlying calibre code for the Windows SAPI speech engine, which was essential for this plugin, has been removed in v7.18 in favour of the Piper speech engine in order to improve the Read Aloud feature in the calibre Viewer. ATM I don't see an obvious solution.
For now, if you want to keep using the 'TTS to MP3' plugin, my best advice is:
- Install a second copy of calibre - Portable for Windows, v7.17 (or earlier) - on a Windows local disk. All the settings and books will be independent of your main copy of calibre on the same PC.
- Install the existing 'TTS to MP3' plugin in this Portable calibre.
- There's no need to populate Portable calibre with all your books. When you want to create a new audiobook, just copy the epub out of your main library and temporarily import it into Portable calibre. Use the plugin to create the audiobook then delete the epub when you've finished.
If it's any consolation this is what I'll be doing myself. It seems to work OK with the copy of calibre Portable v7.16 I already had.
If I find out more I'll post here but I have to advise that my current home situation, as stated in post #1, is now even more difficult than it was in 2022, so anything other than trivial troubleshooting/development will not be possible.