https://archive.org/details/Trope_Trainer_Kinnor_Software_In... thank you Jason Scott! :)
Maybe someone wants to try to get this to work in a VM (or Wine even), report back (and email the author of the article if successful)?
Maybe someone wants to try to get this to work in a VM (or Wine even), report back (and email the author of the article if successful)?
But listening to chanting from DECtalk? Here's "Happy Birthday" via DECtalk.[1]
There was apparently a 90s thing for religious DECtalk files. Here's an archive of them.[2] Here's "The Old Rugged Cross" in DECtalk input format.[3]
This mysterious program that represented so much work is probably mostly a DECtalk player and a big collection of playable religious DECtalk files. If someone were to extract the files, that would recover the content. There are players for DECtalk files; there's one at the links below. Converting them to a better text-to-speech system would help.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150310175636/http://theflameof...
[2] http://theflameofhope.co/SONGS%20FOR%20PC'.html
[3] http://theflameofhope.co/dectalk%20speak%20window/GOSPEL/OLD...
I got to play with DECtalk around 1999, when it was already old, and IIRC required us dusting off an old SGI workstation that could run it in software.
We had a school homework assignment to hand-tune DECtalk encodings of famous lines of speeches by US statesmen, for dramatic delivery. "Essential liberty", "shall not perish from the earth!" etc. Prosody, stress, etc.
The programmer who was doing the DECTalk work talked about this some:
> I ask Schnee if Buchler’s source code could be reconstructed from a copy of the software.
> Not exactly, she says. It might be possible to induce the machine code to dump out a database of every phoneme it had ever uttered — all the tiny pieces it had used to sing Armenian and Lithuanian and Egyptian trope — and then, if you were very patient and very skilled, you might be able to write code to piece them back together.
> It could be done, she says. But it wouldn’t be quick or easy. And it wouldn’t be the same program Buchler wrote.
There's also a sound file of their implementation at the bottom of the article.
And, as someone else pointed out in this thread, there exists an ISO and an activation code at archive.org, and it should be possible to get this running in Wine or in a VM. Someone clever could probably patch the binary to make it run on modern Windows. The distraught rabbis should community-source a developer.
All of that said, even if the source code were to be found, it seems likely that further development of the core functionality might be dead. This was a man's life's work in an esoteric domain; it might not exactly be accessible code.
I have several physical copies of the last edition of Trope Trainer, with serial numbers. They don’t work because they try to phone home for activation. I think they have all of the actual code they need to run, if would could bypass the initial steps. Realbasic binaries are harder to debug than Delphi, and I haven’t had time to really dig into it.
I have a book that makes an argument from Halakha that copyright is a binding norm under Jewish law, but I feel like it's kind of motivated reasoning because copyright as we know it is a 1700s British invention and there's no likelihood that any Jewish communities observed anything directly equivalent to it before that.
There's an additional principle of Jewish law that says that Jews should normally obey secular laws of the places where they live:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_d%27malkhuta_dina
Maybe the warning on the CD is indirectly alluding to that?
The same concept applies in Islam and has been used to justify copyright for Islamic works, even audio recordings of Qur'an recitation, one of the most common Islamic media outside of books themselves. So, the idea makes sense from an Islamic perspective, but there is plenty of room for interpretation and also for different accommodations and adjustments depending on the situation.
For example, it would be likely that a scholar would rule that strict copyright may be violated if the alternative, e.g., the complete loss of usefulness of an otherwise beneficial software, may be violated because the benefits outweigh the harm.
Given that the US law considers breaking copyright to be unlawful, Jewish law would too (in the US).
(disclaimer: not actually Jewish)