FreeTTS Studio: how the pieces fit together

Single voice. It has the gentlest learning curve — type text, pick a voice, hit Generate. Most users only need Single voice to find their preferred voice and pacing. Move on to Dialogue when you need multiple characters, and add renders to the Timeline when you want to chain several clips into one file. Studio per-render caps: free 1,000 · PRO 10,000 · Creator 25,000 characters.

Yes. Every Generate in Single voice counts. Voice previews (the small play button next to a voice in the picker) do NOT count — those use a separate quota-free endpoint. Test as many voices as you want via Preview without burning chars. Free accounts have 5,000 characters a day and 15,000 a month; PRO has 1,000,000 a month, Creator 5,000,000.

Not directly. Dialogue muxes the conversation server-side and returns one merged file. If you need separate files per speaker, generate each speaker's lines in Single voice (switching voices between them), then add each one to the Timeline for chaining. It's slower but gives you full control over the individual audio files.

The Timeline is a PRO overlay that assembles audio you already generated. After any Single voice or Dialogue render, click 'Add to Timeline' below the player. Reorder clips, set a pause after each (0–3 s), preview any clip, and merge up to 100 clips into one continuous MP3. Great for multi-scene projects: intro narration → dialogue scene 1 → narrator break → dialogue scene 2 → outro.

Yes — that's regenerate-one-line, a PRO feature. In Dialogue (and in Single voice after you switch on 'Regenerate by paragraph'), hover any line and hit ↻ to render just that line as a fresh take; the rest of the track is untouched and it re-stitches automatically. Step between takes with ‹ › — it's non-destructive, so a worse take is one tap to undo.

Yes — Single voice and Dialogue both accept SSML on standard, multilingual and HD voices. The most useful tags are <break time="1s"/>, <emphasis level="strong">, <prosody rate="slow">, and <mstts:express-as style="cheerful">. Select text and right-click (or long-press on touch) to insert them, or type them directly. All tags are lowercase — <Break/> with a capital B won't work. Signature voices honour <break> only; Ultra voices read plain text.

Standard and multilingual voices take explicit direction: you control delivery with mstts:express-as style tags, and the Studio chip picker shows exactly which styles your selected voice supports. DragonHD voices (like en-US-Andrew:DragonHDLatestNeural) are our newest-generation Azure tier and automatically read emotion from the text itself. You write "She gasped in horror" and DragonHD delivers it dramatically without you needing the terrified style. The catch: DragonHD ignores mstts:express-as tags and prosody rate/pitch entirely, so manual delivery control is gone — write the emotion into the text and use <break> for pacing. Use a standard or multilingual voice when you want explicit control. Use DragonHD when you want natural delivery from natural writing.

Five common reasons. First, your voice doesn't support that style — only certain voices have specific styles (the Studio chip picker shows what your selected voice supports). Second, you're on a DragonHD, Signature or Ultra voice: DragonHD reads emotion from context, and Signature and Ultra voices read plain text, so all three drop explicit style tags. Third, the wrapped span is too short — emotions need at least 3 words to be reliably audible because the voice needs time to transition into and out of the style; single-word emotion wraps often render as neutral. Wrap a longer phrase, or raise styledegree. Fourth, the wrap crosses a sentence boundary — every period, exclamation, or question mark resets the voice's prosody, so a single emotion wrap that spans two sentences usually only renders the style on one of them. Wrap each sentence separately. Fifth, you used the style outside an mstts:express-as wrapper. The Studio's emotion picker wraps the SSML envelope for you, so this only happens if you're writing raw SSML for the API.

Yes. The homepage /api/tts endpoint and the browser extension both build a full SSML envelope from your text. Drop in <break/>, <emphasis>, <prosody>, even mstts:express-as — they all work on the homepage if the underlying voice supports them. The homepage allows up to 5,000 characters per generation on the free plan (Studio's own free cap is 1,000 per render).

styledegree controls how intense the emotional style is. Default is 1.0. Range is 0.01 (barely-there hint) to 2.0 (cranked up). For most narration the default works fine. Bump to 1.5 or 2.0 for dramatic moments (a battle cry, a grief explosion). Drop to 0.5 for subtle inflection (a hint of sadness under a brave face). Add it as an attribute: <mstts:express-as style="sad" styledegree="0.5">.

The <break time> tag caps at 10 seconds. For longer silences, stack multiple breaks: <break time="10s"/><break time="10s"/><break time="5s"/> gives you 25 seconds. Or use mstts:silence at the top of your document to set a global between-sentence silence if you just want spacious pacing throughout. Between clips in the Timeline the pause is set per clip, up to 3 seconds each.

Studio returns a clear error in the UI telling you what's wrong — usually with the line position — so you can fix it and re-render. A quick sanity check: keep tags lowercase and balanced (every <emphasis> has a matching </emphasis>), and note that the right-click menu inserts well-formed tags for you, so you rarely have to hand-write them.

Yes, three ways. Easiest: pick a Multilingual voice (look for "Multilingual" in the voice name) which can speak ~12 languages with one identity — these are free voices. Most precise: use <lang xml:lang="fr-FR">phrase</lang> inside any Azure voice to switch languages mid-sentence for that span. Most flexible: use Dialogue mode and assign each language to a different voice — you get separate native speakers for each language.

Neural voices have a small amount of natural variation — the same text rendered twice won't be byte-identical even with the same voice and settings. Variation is normally subtle (different breath placement, slight rhythm differences). Larger differences usually come from context — the voice reads a question differently from a statement, an exclamation differently from a declaration. This is a feature, not a bug, and is part of what makes neural voices feel human.

A PRO/Creator feature that stores custom word → pronunciation mappings that auto-apply to ALL your generations. Add 'Camarath' → 'kəˈmɛrəθ' once, and every time you write Camarath in any Studio mode it gets pronounced correctly. Much cleaner than wrapping every instance in <phoneme>. Find it in the dashboard sidebar under Studio settings. Uses International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) — there's a 'Hear it' button to audition before saving. Up to 500 entries per account.

Yes — that's exactly what Dialogue is for. Write your script as `Speaker: line of dialogue` (one per row). Assign each speaker a voice in the picker. Dialogue mode auto-generates the multi-voice SSML for you. Per-line emotion is a small dropdown next to each line, and each line has its own pause. You only need to drop into raw SSML if you want effects beyond voice + style (custom prosody, say-as, etc.).

MP3 (default, all plans) is 24 kHz mono at 96 kbps — universal and small, about 0.7 MB per minute. WAV (PRO) is uncompressed 16-bit PCM at 48 kHz mono, about 5.8 MB per minute — the pick when the file goes into a DAW or gets re-encoded. OGG (PRO) is Opus at 48 kHz — modern, small, but older devices don't all play it. Pick MP3 unless you have a specific reason to use the others.

Yes, on PRO and Creator. Signature voices (30 per language across 53 languages) work in Single voice and Dialogue; they read plain text and honour <break> pauses, other SSML tags are stripped. Ultra voices (21 English voices plus Syrian, Palestinian, Egyptian, Gulf and Modern Standard Arabic) work in Single voice only and read plain text. Everyone can preview both tiers for free from the picker; generating with them needs PRO.

Ultra is a single-voice tier. Dialogue mode refuses Ultra voices per line so a multi-speaker scene never mixes tiers unpredictably. Render the Ultra part in Single voice and chain it with the Dialogue scene in the Timeline instead.

Yes, with Export video (PRO). Any Single voice or Dialogue render becomes a caption-animated MP4 in 9:16 (Reels, Shorts), 1:1 or 16:9 (YouTube), with a wave, bars or circle visualiser and three caption styles: Bold pop, Highlight and Clean. The captions come from the render's word timings, so they stay in sync without editing.