Having spotted that there is a version 1.0.5 of the RockBox Utility I thought I'd give it a go and see if it solved any of my previous problems.
Unfortunately it hasn't but I have discovered that the problems are related to the Voice that I'm trying to use. The voice file I am using is
Lawrence from Cepstral which gives a very natural sound and I'm running RB Util in Vista Home Premium. The engine is Sapi TTS Engine and the encoder is the Speex Encoder.
If I try to generate Talk Files for the Music folder the process dies straight away with the message "Encoding of G:/Music/_dirname.talk.wav failed". However if I switch to the Microsoft Anna voice talk file generation proceeds OK. I can however use the old Voicebox utility perfectly fine with the Lawrence voice.
If I try to generate a Voice File using the Lawrence voice I only get a handful of menu options actually voiced. Again if I use the Microsoft Anna voice the file generates OK and I can hear all the menu options. I was wondering if there are errors similar to the Talk File generation but they're just not displayed?
The Cepestral Voice is not some knocked together thing - it is a company
Microsoft refers you to as a source for alternative voices. Does the utility make assumptions about the voice engine that Lawrence doesn't comply with? As I said the voice works in the old school way with the Voicebox utility.
I tried Lame as the encoder and that didn't give the encoding error message (I had other problems instead which may be due to me not knowing the correct command line options). So it looks as though Speex has some problems encoding wav files from the Lawrence voice