[DECtalk] Major changes at the DECtalk archive

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

If you take a look at http://dectalk.goldenaudio.net/ you'll see that 
I've made some major changes to the archive.  For the most part, nothing 
was deleted but almost all of the directories were moved around.  Below 
are some of the changes:

1. I cleaned up the /text directory.  Almost all files now have a .dec 
extension and I changed most filenames to lower case.  In theory, 
installing the PlayDEC program and associating .dec files with it should 
let you automatically play them from Windows Explorer.  That has not 
been tried yet but it should work.  The files that still have a .txt 
extension are probably duplicates.  I'm looking for a volunteer to go 
through them and make sure.  I would like to get the dupes cleaned up 
because I'm planning to have a zip file of all the .dec files for easier 
downloading.

2. I moved all the individual artist directories out of the root and 
into their own /artists directory.  I also removed the spaces, corrected 
the case as necessary and replaced the spaces with underlines.  For 
example, the "Blake Roberts" directory has now moved to 
/artists/Blake_Roberts.  Hopefully it makes for a less cluttered 
appearance and things are easier to find.

3. I created two new directories and moved files around.  Now, all the 
DECtalk related software, manual, etc is in the /dectalk directory.  
That's also where playdec.zip is.  The /dectalk/software directory has 
versions 4.3, 4.4 and others not from GW Micro.  The GW_Micro directory 
has now moved and is under the \dectalk\software directory.  The files 
from GW Micro are different sizes and have different contents.  The 
DECtalk PC manual moved from the /text directory to the /dectalk 
directory.  I also created \dectalk\examples which has various example 
files.

5. I created the /synthesizers directory.  That's mostly the same as the 
old hardware synth demos but also includes some files that were in other 
places, like in misc.  I created /synthesizers/software_demos which is 
currently empty but will hopefully contain demo files of software 
synthesizers such as Eloquence, etc.

What's still left to do:

1. go through all the artist directories and delete adult and illegal files
2. eliminate dupes in the /text directory
3. create basic web pages giving some background
4. go through the misc directory, do some cleaning and create a new 
README file

As always, suggestions are welcome, especially on the new structure.  If 
you can't find something or it seems confusing, post here and let me 
know.  I'm still not 100% decided on upload procedures but feel free to 
contact me if you want to upload anything.  I'm especially looking for 
synthesizer demos, more on that in the next message.

Tony Baechler, DECtalk archive maintainer
tony at baechler.net