Memorization

At the beginning of the summer one of the pastor's of my church challenged the congregation as a whole to memorize a particular book of the Bible, James 1.  Memorization is not my strong suit but I am not one to turn down a challenge so I dug in.  Well, at least for the first month or so during which time I got about half way there. During a sleepless night last night a thought came to me: my Mac can convert text into speech and I bet those spoken words could be saved as an audio file.

It can.

Here's the workflow to download if you feel frightened by the idea of building it yourself in Automator.  The file needs to be placed in your ~/Library/Services/ folder, that is, the Library found in your home directory. (If you want to make it available for all users of your computer, just place it in the global library folder /Library/Services/).  If you don't have a Services folder in your library just create one and drop it in.

To use the service just highlight the desired text, go to the menu of that application, select "Services" and then "Text to AAC".  The workflow will create an AAC audio file out of that text and save it in your iTunes folder as a song called "Text to AAC Output". Not only is this a neato demonstration of a built in feature on all Macs, but it has been actually useful in helping me with my memorization.