Ved Manual Contents: 1. Keyboard Controls 1.1. Numeric Keypad 1.2. Other Keys 2. Using Ved 3. Utilities 4. Problems 5. Feedback, please! 1. Keyboard Controls: 1.1. Numeric Keypad: 4 back 5 this, or stop 6 next 1 in (at the start) 2 in 3 in (at the end) 7 start 8 out 9 end 0 insert before, or paste before . insert after, or paste after / change * delete - cut + play, or stop here enter break, or join 1.2. Other Keys: escape quit ` help z slower x normal speed c faster a softer s normal loudness d louder 2. Using Ved Run ved from the command-line with a single argument, the name of the work you want to edit. Your work is kept in a directory, not a single file. Press escape to quit using ved. Press the backtick key (`) for help mode. In help mode, press a key for a spoken reminder of what it does. Press the backtick key again to exit help mode. In addition to the quit and help keys, ved uses all the keys on the numeric keypad except num-lock (for navigation, editing and playback), and the six letter keys a, s, d, z, x and c (to adjust speed and volume settings). It ignores other key presses. Num-lock must be turned on. Ved's main controls are on the numeric keypad. The most essiental controls are 4, 5, 6 to navigate, 0 and . to record, 5 to stop recording, and * to delete. Ved starts recording your speech when you press one of the insert keys (0 or .), and stops recording when you press this/stop (5). If you press any other key while recording, it will stop recording and then try to perform the action associated with that key. If your sound system is borked you may have to pause for a moment before pressing stop, or you might lose the tail of your speech. To insert a paragraph break, press break (enter) while recording to insert a sentence break. Press break (enter) twice in a row to insert a chapter break, three times for a "book break". After you cut (-) something, the insert keys that normally start recording are used to paste it back. You can only paste something at the same level you cut it from; i.e. you can't paste a chapter between two paragraphs, only between two chapters. The out and in buttons are used to move up and down from the sentence level to the book level. 4. Utilities The are a few utilities included with ved: - ved-play plays back a ved work (optionally at a different speed), and can produce .wav files - ved-compress compresses a ved work with speex. This may be quite lossy. - ved-uncompress uncompresses it again. - ved-clean purges deleted samples from a work. (Ved keeps all samples including deleted ones in the .pool directory, arranged by date, and remembers where deleted samples used to be in the .deleted file. In case of accidents (cat sat on the * key?) it is possible to recover your samples.) 4. Problems You will very likely need to adjust your mixer, and the volume settings in ved.conf. You can copy the defaults from /usr/lib/ved/ved.conf to /etc/ved.conf or ~/.ved.conf and edit them. The other default settings should be okay. You can fine tune them depending on ambient noise, etc. If you don't have a numeric keypad, you won't be able to use ved properly unless you edit ved-main and remap the keys. Sorry! Num-lock must be turned on. When you run ved on the linux console, it turns num-lock on automatically. If you press a key which sends an escape sequence, such as a function key, Home, or a keypad key when num-lock is turned off, ved will think you pressed escape and quit. If this happens, just run ved again to start where you left off. You can only insert a break while recording. To split a paragraph into two, you have to go to the right spot, press insert, quietly press break and press stop. This is a bit complicated! Ved stores your speech in raw 16-bit 8000Hz mono pcm files. I think it may be using native byte-order, which is not portable. It might be better to use .wav files, but these ones are handy in that you can cat them together easily. ved-compress and ved-uncompress assume the samples are little-endian. I have not tested ved on a big-endian machine. ved cannot edit compressed works, it will play them as noise! Ved keeps the samples you delete in case of accidents, but does not yet provide an undo feature! I apologise for this inadequate documentation, and I hope you can get to grips with ved in spite of it! If you are not blind and you want to use ved, I suggest to make some little labels and stick them on the keys, that's what I did anyway. 5. Feedback, please! Please send feedback to the author, Sam Watkins .