Announcer not working in Indigo 2021-1

[Mirko]

Hi Nathan,

I have been using the Announcer plug-inn for years now and with great appreciation. The fact that I can use sound bites in my indigo made me develop art-installations that use sound and info from the internet and via Indigo to the Announcer plug-inn..
Right now it doesn't work anymore in the Indigo 2021-1 on my headless MacMini running 10.12.6
I upgraded today and found the silence deafening.

Could you upgrade this plug-inn so it will work again?

That would be wonderful!

Thanks a lot
Kind regards,

Mirko

[nsheldon]

Hi Mirko.

Yes. I noticed this as well. It appears that the "mactypes" and "appscript" Python libraries are no longer part of the Indigo plugin environment. I haven't found a workaround yet, so until I do, the only solution is to revert to the previous version of Indigo, or stop using the Announcer plugin (at least until I can find a solution). The Venstar Thermostat plugin I use (which I believe the developer stopped supporting a while ago) also stopped working for the same reason.

[Mirko]

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for the reply.

I decided to wait for a solution because it took me quite some effort to get indigo 2021-1 working with all the 100s of devices and triggers etc.

So hopefully there is a workaround for you (and me )

Thanks!

Kind regards,

Mirko

[howartp]

Nathan, depending on licensing, there should be no problem with you including the missing libraries as a subfolder in your plugin.

We used to do same for Requests until it was included.

Peter


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[jay (support)]

Development of the appscript module was halted years ago (2012), and I believe that it would not work on M1 macs. It was also reliant on some macOS SDK features that are likely to break anyway.

Not sure what exactly you (Nathan) were using it for but I’m sure there are alternatives.

[nsheldon]

Thanks Peter. I may end up doing that, with the caveat that it may not work on M1 Macs.

@Jay: the Announcer plugin is basically a hack that creates audio files for text-to-speech which it then sends to an old utility app called "Play Sound" (which was also abandoned probably 9 or 10 years ago) using AppleScript. The Play Sound app is only controllable via AppleScript and probably won't even run on M1 Macs either. There was always going to come a time when some or all parts of the Announcer hack was going to stop working due to the demise of the Play Sound app. So really, I need to find an alternative to both Play Sound and the use of AppleScript. The "mactypes" library was being used to get the list of TTS voices installed on the Mac. I don't know what alternatives there are to that. I may be able to include that library myself though, as Peter suggested.

[jay (support)]

Sounds like you are already using the say command line to create the audio file. You can use the afplay command line to actually play a sound file.

You can also get all voices from the say command that can be used by it:

Code: Select all

say -v '?'

You'd need to parse the output, but that shouldn't be a big deal. There may be other options, but those might be good enough (and pretty straight-forward) to switch to.

[nsheldon]

Good point! Thanks for the tips Jay!

[Mirko]

Hi Nathan,

It is maybe impolite to ask if you made some progress getting this plugin working again, but I'm stuck with all the triggers etc that I made using Announcer.

I really hope you will.

Thanks anyway!

Mirko

[nsheldon]

Hi Nathan,

It is maybe impolite to ask if you made some progress getting this plugin working again, but I'm stuck with all the triggers etc that I made using Announcer.

I really hope you will.

Thanks anyway!

Mirko

Hi Mirko. I'm sorry. I haven't had time to work on it lately. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[killerdan56]

Someone get this updated!