Snow Leopard Service: Text to iTunes

I often find it convenient to listen to certain articles instead of reading them. Here are some services I made to let me easily create audio files from text and import them into a "Text to Speech" playlist in iTunes.

Features

  • Smart automatic title creation
  • Sets iTunes metadata such as "Remember playback position"
  • Appends "End of text to speech." to the audio file. It is often easy to miss the end of files like this when playback continues to another track.

There are two included services. One creates the file without prompting for a filename, and the other lets you set it manually if you want. Both of them are smart about creating a good filename based on what you select.

To use the service, select some text and click on the main menu for the current application. Then select "Text to iTunes" from the "Services" menu.

Download the files and place them in ~/Library/Services.

Note: ~/ refers to the home folder of the current user.