"An error has occurred" countless times, TomTom Home

[canderson]

Ah, it would appear that has resolved the problem! I'm no longer receiving the error at all.
Fine work, gentlemen. +Rep for excellent service!

Just sorry it took so many back-and-forth to get you there. Having never actually looked at the old Vocalizer file/folder structure, I wasn't confident that I knew where all the pieces were. Guess there's enough gone now to keep Home from complaining.

I have no idea why Home suddenly takes offense to some older file data. As I say, when I updated Home to 2.8, it immediately started to gripe about an OLD map (715) that was part of the first backup I ever did with Home of my original 720 unit - before I knew better than to use Home, of course! As the map files weren't corrupted in any way - I checked that - it seems that new versions of Home are simply no longer able to understand some of the subsystem structures used back in the 'days of yesteryear', then starts to gripe about them. In my case, old maps. In your case, an old TTS voice.

Now that you are functional again, you might want to consider grabbing a "computer" voice with Home and seeing what you think when your unit pronounces street and exit names. It really is pretty nice, although it will blow the pronunciation now and again.

And of course, before you do ANYTHING, make yourself a fresh Explorer backup of your unit in its "new" and happy condition.

 

[thefowles1]

Hey, no worries! The ends justified the means... which, honestly, were nothing to apologize for.

How do I go about doing that? I can think of resetting it to factory settings, but is there an easier way? Like using Home? (TomTom n00b here.)

Would a backup via Home be sufficient? (That is, presuming by Explorer backup you mean going in and copy/pasting the entirety of the content on my device via).

 

[canderson]

As for the backup, that's pretty much the size of it. The caveat is that you want to back up any hidden/system folders on the TomTom as well, and the instructions below cover that, too:

https://www.tomtomforums.com/genera...4-how-backup-contents-your-unit-computer.html

As for grabbing a "computer" voice, yes, that is accomplished via TomTom Home. After you've got your backup done, you can use Home's option to "Add Traffic, Voices, Safety Cameras, etc.". You should be offered one or more computer voices to download and install. Select "Voices", then specifically, "Computer Voices". What you have now are what are called "Recorded Voices".

 

[thefowles1]

I see, I see. Many thanks, canderson.

 

[thefowles1]

Interesting... I downloaded both Samantha and Tom, computer voices, and I notice that their filesizes are 32.5 and 24.1 MB, respectively, as opposed to Mandy, a recorded voice, which is only 0.7 MB.

Why do computer voices take up more space than a recorded voice? As someone who has some work with audio production, I would expect a recorded voice to take up the larger space.

 

[dhn]

On the contrary, computer voices require associated lex files etc. to make them verbalize words......... and it still comes out poorly in many cases.

 

[thefowles1]

So a computerized voice takes up more space than a recorded voice... how odd. Huh.
By the way, what is that information in your guys' signatures? Is that your devices?

 

[canderson]

So a computerized voice takes up more space than a recorded voice... how odd. Huh.

The number of words for the instructions in the recorded voices are quite few in number. Doesn't take much space. The "computer" voices require a great deal of information to render anything close to normal sounding speech from text. Let's just say that while French is worse, English isn't exactly phonetic, either. It takes quite a number of rules and exceptions to make it all work.

By the way, what is that information in your guys' signatures? Is that your devices?

Yup, and often also firmware level, and map level.