Listing outside of emacspeak WAS:Sychronising with the speech server.

["Greg E. Priest-Dorman" <priestdo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Barry,

This is not exactly an answer to your question, rather two alternative
ways to be able to listen without your computer.  I have used both
these methods in the past.  The first to record casset tapes for those
rare times I will not have access to my computer or wave files for
times when I want "canned speech" (like system start up) but not CDs.

The advantage of tape is that you can varry the playback speed.  Now
that CD-R disks are so cheap I can see the appeal though.

The simplest way to go to tape is with the cmdlinespeakfile program
that comes with the ViaVoiceTTS distribution, on my system (debian)
it installed in /usr/lib/ViaVoiceTTS/samples/cmdlinespeak/  Take a
look at the script runcmdlinespeakfile and you should see what you
need to do to get it to read an entire file.  This of course does not
solve your problem of creating a wave file for output but it can go
directly to casset tape via audio out on your sound card.

If you do find a way to capture the output of ViaVoice to wave please
let me know, I have not tried this but I can imagine a few
applications where it would be usefull.

Alternativly you can accomplish what you are trying to do with
festival.  There is a script that comes with the festival distribution
called text2wave.  In the debian distribution it is not installed but
is gziped in /usr/doc/festival/examples.  It will record a 16000khz
mono wave file of a text file with the command:

  text2wav infile -o outfile.wav

Since it does not use the sound card when doing this, you can issue
this command in a shell within emacspeak.  You can then type the
playback command in the same shell, but turn off emacspeak speech
before pressing the return key to hear it:

       bplay outfile.wav   C-e d q  Return

That is, type the command in the shell in emacspeak, issue the command
"C-e d q" to turn off emacspeak's speech, press return to hear the
speech or some part of it to check it out.  

I have never taken the step of recording an audio cd from this wave
file.  I would guess that you might need to convert the 16000kHz mono
into something else.  (44000kHz stereo?) Sox will most likly be able
to help you here.  I have however created mpegs from the resulting
speech which could, I suppose be used on a small mpeg player, although
I have not done this.

I also noticed, though never messed with, festivals ability to muck
with its own output rate.  Have a look at the documentation for
festival in section 6,
(/usr/doc/festival-doc/festival/user-manual/festival_6.html).

In the little I did with it I let it record at its defaults and then
played the resulting wave file back at a higher speed to increase
reading speed.  But then some of us used to listening at high pich
from years of recorded books.  

I have not played with festival enough to learn if there is a way to
increase its reading speed.  Again, if you find one, please let me
know.

Hope this helps,

Greg

--
 Greg Priest-Dorman
 priestdo@xxxxxxxxxxx


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help"