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DATE : 2021.01.13
TIME : 06:35
AUTHOR :
[email protected]
TITLE : FESTIVAL, OR THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME
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Many moons ago, I had a podcast that I recorded from my car during
my commute. As a time saving measure, instead of correcting
mistakes, or even worse, re-recording all or a portion of the
podcast, I would use festival and the festival program, text2wave
to have a computer generated, female voice, interrupt me and read
aloud any corrections that were needed. She more or less became
part of the show and was personified as Lynn. It was silly, and
fun, but it solved a problem, worked for me, and in some way sort
of reminded me of the fun my brother and sister had as kids back
in the 70s using a tape cassette recorder and the heating ducts
in our floor to broadcast our "radio station" from one room to
the other.
Back then, 2005-2010-ish, getting festival to sound "good"
required installing the CMU Artic SLT voices, or better yet the
Nitech HTS voices, and also required compiling and installing the
latest festival from source. It seems to be much easier now, at
least with debian, to get a result almost as good as I was able
to achieve back in 2005 since the festvox-us-slt-hts voices are
in the repo and get me very close to where I was then. Simply
installing the festvox-us-slt-hts deb was enough to pull in
everything I needed to get things working.
Sadly, the Nitech HTS voices are still problematic, in fact even
more so. In 2005 you had to have the latest version of festival
and now in 2020 you have to have an old version since the Nitech
HTS voices are not compatible with versions of festival greater
than 2.1. Ain't that a kick in the head, the more things change
the more they stay the same.
None of this is probably new information, but its sort of news
to me since I am re-visiting festival for the first time in 11
years. A lot has changed since then and commercial text to speech
solutions are scary good nowadays; but if you want to use FOSS,
festival still foots the bill.
-dsyates
(o\_!_/o)
