Anki flash cards with audio

Here I discuss how I got audio samples working in Anki (for Mac OS X) and AnkiDroid (for Android).

Using say⌗

Mac OS comes with a text-to-speech utility, say. Say supports a few voices, many of which are tailored to specific languages. I ran:

$ say -v "?" | grep zh_
Mei-Jia    zh_TW  # 您好，我叫美佳。我說國語。 
Sin-ji     zh_HK  # 您好，我叫 Sin-ji。我講廣東話。 
Ting-Ting  zh_CN  # 您好，我叫Ting-Ting。我讲中文普通话。

It looks like Ting-Ting is the best match, since I want to render audio with a mainland Chinese accent. So we can render and save an audio sample with:

/usr/bin/say -v Ting-Ting "拼音" -o ~/path/to/output

I wanted to avoid the cost of converting the generated audio file, since there would be as many unique files as there are flash cards. I used .flac since it was the only format which say can natively render on Mac OS X and which Android (and, by extension AnkiDroid, running on Android) can open.

Saving to Anki⌗

Anki looks for media at a path which varies per-platform. Since I’m on Mac OS X, I need to save my samples to ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/User 1/media.collection/<file>.flac.

In Anki, you can use the special embed syntax [sound:<file>] which renders a system-native audio player. If the field containing that embed is on the front of a card, it will play when the card first appears; otherwise it will play when the reverse of the card is revealed.

Conclusion⌗

I ended up writing this behavior directly into pleco-to-anki, which now generate the audio samples, save them to ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/media.collection, and generate a .csv with a column containing embed syntax as specified above. You may need to adapt this workflow for your own platform and card/field format.