Voca 1.5.0: Donations and Better Marmalade Pocket TTS Playback

Voca 1.5.0 is a feature release that follows 1.4.2. It adds a way to support the project, improves playback with Marmalade Pocket TTS voices, and fixes several reliability issues.

In Settings, scroll to Support and tap Open wallet beside Donate to Voca. Voca opens its Lightning address in your wallet app. If no wallet app can handle the address, Voca offers to copy it so you can paste it where you like. Gain controls work the same as before.

With Marmalade Pocket voices, Voca now starts live playback right away when a sentence has no rendered audio yet, so the extra wait before live speech is gone. While a sentence plays, Voca queues the next one so the engine can start preparing it earlier. This reduces avoidable pauses between sentences, but short gaps can still happen. The first sentence may also take a moment while the engine loads its voice model. Live lookahead is turned off while a sleep timer is set. Audio that was already rendered and cached is still reused. Other speech engines keep their existing behavior.

Estimated word highlighting with Pocket voices now waits for the engine to deliver audio. Highlights are still estimates and may not line up exactly with what you hear.

This release also fixes an intermittent problem where shared or pasted text did not start reading, or read the previously open document instead. Other fixes improve bookmark lookup, cancelling background work, writing local saved files atomically, keeping data that is still being saved during cleanup, keeping secure data encrypted if key storage fails, keeping document access permissions, and handling partial reads and unknown file sizes when hashing files.

Download Voca 1.5.0 at https://blossom.jumble.social/e93ce2191070000a75b5bfd68c658ec64b711db28207093deb1bdaf4a5584217. The source code is available at https://gitworkshop.dev/npub17h9fn2ny0lycg7kmvxmw6gqdnv2epya9h9excnjw9wvml87nyw8sqy3hpu/voca.