Re: emacspeak, festival and mbrola patch

[Barak Zalstein <bzalstein@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pierre Lorenzon wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Thank you for your mail and for accepting
>testing this experimental work.
>
>From: Barak Zalstein <bzalstein@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: emacspeak, festival and mbrola patch
>Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 13:38:42 -0400
>
>bzalstein> Hi,
>bzalstein> 
>bzalstein> I have few comments on following the instructions in
>bzalstein> http://www.pollock-nageoire.net/festival/festival-english004.html
>bzalstein> 
>bzalstein> * The mbrola that I unzipped is called mbrola-linux-i386.
>bzalstein> Since the festival patch is looking for mbrola in the path, that name
>bzalstein> should be changed.
>	   Yes that's true, and I said that in section 3.3.1 but
>	   it was maybe not precise enough waht must be
>	   done. You know the name of the binary is
>	   system dependent. To avoid customizing
>	   certain scheme files of Festival the solution
>	   is to link the appropriate binary to
>	   a uniform name which is in general /usr/local/bin/mbrola.
>bzalstein> 
>bzalstein> * Installing festival requires a bunch of other stuff like speech tools,
>bzalstein> CMU, festvox, POSLEX.
>bzalstein> Most importantly, if festival make fails (because your newly installed 
>bzalstein> gcc 3.*
>bzalstein> is too standard compliant), the best thing is to modify
>bzalstein> speech_tools compiler into something like gcc 2.96. e.g.
>	   I don't think so because I have a gcc 3.* and it
>	   compiles well except that there are a few warning but
>	   which seem not to be important because finally
>	   the system functions. 
>
I am a bit biased toward gcc 2.96 because my day job involves "abusing" 
that source.
Anyway I encountered few errors with gcc 3.3 prerelease like 
"strstream.h: No such file or directory" which
is similar to other C++ problems I have encountered in the past.
(I'm having trouble bootstrapping gcc 3.3 at the moment), and if I 
remember correctly festival builds fine
with the gcc version that comes with redhat 9 (3.2.2).

>I must confess that the
>	   section about Festival in my doc is not
>	   complete enough as well. There are not enough
>	   details about what exactly must be donwloaded.
>bzalstein> * config/compilers/gcc296.mak (COMPILER_DESC): define GCC296 as gcc296.
>bzalstein> * config/config (COMPILER): change to gcc296.
>bzalstein> (according to the INSTALL file, speech_tools should be extracted in a 
>bzalstein> neighbour directory to festival, so that's where festival makefiles are
>bzalstein> looking for).
>	   That's true again but it is clearly set in
>	   the installation instructions of festival. That's
>	   why I thought it was not necessary to
>	   rewrite it in my dratft (Moreover I not so much
>	   time !)
>bzalstein> 
>bzalstein> * After downloading the various voices and putting them in the proper 
>bzalstein> directory, I finally got festival to use french voices and it sounds 
>bzalstein> really cool, but a bit too fast.
>	   You can make them slower by setting the speed
>	   under Festival with the command
>	   (Parameter.set 'Duration_Stretch x.y). The value
>	   for medium speed is 1.0. If you want something
>	   slower set a greater value (1.2) for instance. A lower
>	   value will make the speech rate greater.
>bzalstein> 
>bzalstein> * Patching and running emacspeak:
>bzalstein> Patching doesn't work. (N.B. I just rechecked your site again and found 
>bzalstein> a different patch now).
>	   Excuse me !!!! Please !!! The patch was not
>	   good ! I tested the new one and it semmes to work
>	   now.
>
Go easy on yourself. QA is so much easier than coding.

>bzalstein> It wants to create files that already exist.
>bzalstein> What I did eventually was to apply the patch into an empty directory.
>bzalstein> I also unpacked emacspeak 18 into another directory.
>bzalstein> Since make config didn't work, I have done the following change:
>bzalstein> * lisp/Makefile (cus-load.el): change -l cus-dep.elc into -l cus-dep
>bzalstein> I then copied the patch files to this directory.
>bzalstein> $ cp -rf ../emacspeak-18.0-festival/* .
>bzalstein> and typed "make" again ("make" and "make emacspeak" work the same, I guess).
>bzalstein> The make install failed again with cus-dep.el thing (result of patch) so I
>bzalstein> fixed it again.
>	   The problem of cus-dep.el is something different.
>	   You will encounter this bug without the patch as
>	   well. This new version of emacspeak assumes that
>	   certain files which are not part of the
>	   standard emacs package are installed such
>	   as this cus-dep.el. Therefor you must install
>	   these files. Under RedHat just install the
>	   package emacs-el-21.2 ....
>bzalstein> Only to fail with:
>bzalstein> if test  -x /sbin/install-info ; then \
>bzalstein> 	install-info emacspeak.info /etc/info-dir; \
>bzalstein> fi
>bzalstein> (I'm using Red Hat 9)
>	   That's why ! You probably didn't make a server
>	   installation but only a desktop installation
>	   and the package emacs-el of which I was speaking
>	   above is not installed in this case.
>bzalstein> So I commented out this line. Meanwhile I'll use this one instead:
>bzalstein> 	/sbin/install-info emacspeak.info /etc/info-dir;
>bzalstein> $ make install
>bzalstein> works.
>bzalstein> running efm works to some extent - I can hear "festival" when it loads.
>bzalstein> but when I try to work with it and change rate or read a buffer, it very 
>bzalstein> soon just hangs.
>	   Hum your last problem is probably the most tricky !
>	   Did you test Festival alone ? 
>
Yes I did.

>Did you try to make it
>	   speak a long text. For instance you can do 
>	   .../bin/festival --tts text (where text is a file
>	   containing only ascci characters ?) 
>
I tried it on alice-30.txt from project gutenberg and it talks for a 
very long time.
Sometimes on long sentences it gets "tired" and slows down.

>If you
>	   already have problems at these steps I would guess
>	   that the further problems come from here.
>	   Did you check you r sound system and are you sure
>	   that it is completely functional ? Which hardware
>	   sound device are you using ? Which software 
>	   are you using ? (Alsa ?)
>
It is quite possible that this is a driver problem as in addition to the 
above festival
symptoms, I sometimes lose all sound on my machine.
The hardware browser information is
Device: "VT8233 AC97 Audio Controller"
and device information is
Manufacturer: "VIA Technologies",
Driver: "via82cxxx_audio".
This was automatically recognized and configured at installation time.
I don't know enough about sound configuration myself, but reading
the file /etc/modules.conf yields the line :
alias sound-slot-0 via82cxxx_audio
(If I understand correctly, this is an OSS thing).

>
>	   Excuse me if all these questions seem to be stupid
>	   but I don't know anything about your system. I
>	   encountered such a problem using ViaVoice and think it
>	   came from incompatibility between ViaVoice
>	   and the sound device.
>
>	   Make sure the problem simply didn't come from this bad
>	   patch installing the new one and excuse me
>	   again for having provided such a bugged thing !
>
Again, my pleasue ;-)

>bzalstein> 
>bzalstein> Regards,
>bzalstein> Barak.
>bzalstein> 
>	   Regards
>
>	   Pierre
>
>  
>


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