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. 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.

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 an 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 (0–10s), preview any clip, and merge 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. In Dialogue (and single-voice 'Regenerate by paragraph' mode), 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. 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.

HD voices (like en-US-Aria:HDLatestNeural) are higher-bitrate versions of standard neural voices. Same expressive control via mstts:express-as tags, just better audio quality. DragonHD voices (like en-US-Andrew:DragonHDLatestNeural) are our newest-generation 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 entirely, so manual style control is gone. Use HD 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 voice, which reads emotion from context and ignores explicit style tags entirely. 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 bump the intensity slider higher. 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 for the most reliable result. 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 1,000-char free-tier per-generation cap still applies though.

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.

Yes, on the Creator plan. You record 60 seconds of clean audio of yourself talking naturally (no background noise, normal pace), upload it from /dashboard?section=voice-clone, and the system trains a personal voice in about 5 minutes. Once cloned, your voice appears in the picker like any other voice. Creator includes 1 voice clone and 100,000 cloned characters per month. Quality scales with the recording — invest in 60 seconds of really clean audio and the clone will sound impressively close.

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. Most precise: use <lang xml:lang="fr-FR">phrase</lang> inside any 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.

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 style overrides are also supported via the small style dropdown next to each line. You only need to drop into raw SSML if you want effects beyond voice + style (custom pauses, prosody, etc.).

All three are generated from the same 24 kHz neural synthesis source. MP3 (default, 160 kbps) is universal and small. WAV is uncompressed PCM — same source quality, ~2.5x file size, ideal for re-editing in a DAW. OGG/Opus is the most modern, smallest at equivalent quality, but older browsers and devices don't support it. Pick MP3 unless you have a specific reason to use the others.