Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Generate morse code followed by spoken letter audio files

I've had several shots at learning morse code. In episode 108 of the excellent QSO Today podcast, there was a great suggestion that the guest learned morse code by listening over and over to a recording of morse code characters followed by the spoken letter.

Despite hunting the internet I could only find other people looking for similar drill tapes but no actual audio files.

macOS has an excellent text to speech synthesiser so I found some software to convert text to morse in a wav file and combined it with the macOS "say" command and now have a system that can generate random sequences.

You can hear a short sample here.

I've forked the original repo and put my version here. The bulk of the work is by Thomas Horsten but hasn't been touched for years.

I've done the following:

  • Made it build on macOS, note it needs libsndfile (brew install libsndfile)
  • generate.py generates wav files for the morse and spoken character
  • makePractice.py makes a wav file with random sequences of letters

The silence between the morse character and the spoken character can be tuned as can the silence between groups.

I've put a full length drill recording up here. This one repeats each letter three times.

2 comments:

patrickvk2pn@gmail.com said...

More than cool... It may be a very good tool to learn morse for many aspirants.

Langley Family said...

Great Peter,

Thanks for sharing this - although programming random Letter/Morse sequences may elude me for a while (i have had no programming experience), the recording you offer will be most helpful. I also use this song and similar songs on YouTube but they can be a bit irritating after a while!

http://youtu.be/2_qQZ92onhU


73s

Steve VK3SL