Re: emacspeak, festival and mbrola patch

[Pierre Lorenzon <lorenzon@xxxxxxxxxxx-psud.fr>]

From: Barak Zalstein <bzalstein@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: emacspeak, festival and mbrola patch
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 01:26:50 -0400

bzalstein> that source.
bzalstein> Anyway I encountered few errors with gcc 3.3 prerelease like 
bzalstein> "strstream.h: No such file or directory" which
bzalstein> is similar to other C++ problems I have encountered in the past.
bzalstein> (I'm having trouble bootstrapping gcc 3.3 at the moment), and if I 
bzalstein> remember correctly festival builds fine
bzalstein> with the gcc version that comes with redhat 9 (3.2.2).
bzalstein> 
bzalstein> >I must confess that the
bzalstein> >	   section about Festival in my doc is not
bzalstein> >	   complete enough as well. There are not enough
bzalstein> >	   details about what exactly must be donwloaded.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> * config/compilers/gcc296.mak (COMPILER_DESC): define GCC296 as gcc296.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> * config/config (COMPILER): change to gcc296.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> (according to the INSTALL file, speech_tools should be extracted in a 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> neighbour directory to festival, so that's where festival makefiles are
bzalstein> >bzalstein> looking for).
bzalstein> >	   That's true again but it is clearly set in
bzalstein> >	   the installation instructions of festival. That's
bzalstein> >	   why I thought it was not necessary to
bzalstein> >	   rewrite it in my dratft (Moreover I not so much
bzalstein> >	   time !)
bzalstein> >bzalstein> 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> * After downloading the various voices and putting them in the proper 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> directory, I finally got festival to use french voices and it sounds 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> really cool, but a bit too fast.
bzalstein> >	   You can make them slower by setting the speed
bzalstein> >	   under Festival with the command
bzalstein> >	   (Parameter.set 'Duration_Stretch x.y). The value
bzalstein> >	   for medium speed is 1.0. If you want something
bzalstein> >	   slower set a greater value (1.2) for instance. A lower
bzalstein> >	   value will make the speech rate greater.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> * Patching and running emacspeak:
bzalstein> >bzalstein> Patching doesn't work. (N.B. I just rechecked your site again and found 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> a different patch now).
bzalstein> >	   Excuse me !!!! Please !!! The patch was not
bzalstein> >	   good ! I tested the new one and it semmes to work
bzalstein> >	   now.
bzalstein> >
bzalstein> Go easy on yourself. QA is so much easier than coding.
bzalstein> 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> It wants to create files that already exist.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> What I did eventually was to apply the patch into an empty directory.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> I also unpacked emacspeak 18 into another directory.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> Since make config didn't work, I have done the following change:
bzalstein> >bzalstein> * lisp/Makefile (cus-load.el): change -l cus-dep.elc into -l cus-dep
bzalstein> >bzalstein> I then copied the patch files to this directory.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> $ cp -rf ../emacspeak-18.0-festival/* .
bzalstein> >bzalstein> and typed "make" again ("make" and "make emacspeak" work the same, I guess).
bzalstein> >bzalstein> The make install failed again with cus-dep.el thing (result of patch) so I
bzalstein> >bzalstein> fixed it again.
bzalstein> >	   The problem of cus-dep.el is something different.
bzalstein> >	   You will encounter this bug without the patch as
bzalstein> >	   well. This new version of emacspeak assumes that
bzalstein> >	   certain files which are not part of the
bzalstein> >	   standard emacs package are installed such
bzalstein> >	   as this cus-dep.el. Therefor you must install
bzalstein> >	   these files. Under RedHat just install the
bzalstein> >	   package emacs-el-21.2 ....
bzalstein> >bzalstein> Only to fail with:
bzalstein> >bzalstein> if test  -x /sbin/install-info ; then \
bzalstein> >bzalstein> 	install-info emacspeak.info /etc/info-dir; \
bzalstein> >bzalstein> fi
bzalstein> >bzalstein> (I'm using Red Hat 9)
bzalstein> >	   That's why ! You probably didn't make a server
bzalstein> >	   installation but only a desktop installation
bzalstein> >	   and the package emacs-el of which I was speaking
bzalstein> >	   above is not installed in this case.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> So I commented out this line. Meanwhile I'll use this one instead:
bzalstein> >bzalstein> 	/sbin/install-info emacspeak.info /etc/info-dir;
bzalstein> >bzalstein> $ make install
bzalstein> >bzalstein> works.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> running efm works to some extent - I can hear "festival" when it loads.
bzalstein> >bzalstein> but when I try to work with it and change rate or read a buffer, it very 
bzalstein> >bzalstein> soon just hangs.
bzalstein> >	   Hum your last problem is probably the most tricky !
bzalstein> >	   Did you test Festival alone ? 
bzalstein> >
bzalstein> Yes I did.
bzalstein> 
bzalstein> >Did you try to make it
bzalstein> >	   speak a long text. For instance you can do 
bzalstein> >	   .../bin/festival --tts text (where text is a file
bzalstein> >	   containing only ascci characters ?) 
bzalstein> >
bzalstein> I tried it on alice-30.txt from project gutenberg and it talks for a 
bzalstein> very long time.
bzalstein> Sometimes on long sentences it gets "tired" and slows down.
bzalstein> 
bzalstein> >If you
bzalstein> >	   already have problems at these steps I would guess
bzalstein> >	   that the further problems come from here.
bzalstein> >	   Did you check you r sound system and are you sure
bzalstein> >	   that it is completely functional ? Which hardware
bzalstein> >	   sound device are you using ? Which software 
bzalstein> >	   are you using ? (Alsa ?)
bzalstein> >
bzalstein> It is quite possible that this is a driver problem as in addition to the 
bzalstein> above festival
bzalstein> symptoms, I sometimes lose all sound on my machine.
bzalstein> The hardware browser information is
bzalstein> Device: "VT8233 AC97 Audio Controller"
bzalstein> and device information is
bzalstein> Manufacturer: "VIA Technologies",
Excuse-me for having taken such a long time to answer your
message. I am not very faithful in via chipsets ! I know that
they are causing troubles to the alsa drivers but
people told me that they are recognized by the
standard oss driver. Unfortunately I do not have such
a hardware and it is not easy for me to make tests.
However I can try to do such tests in the future but not
very soon.

Check other sound applications to determine if
they work well or not.

Best regards

Pierre

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