Re: emacspeak, festival and mbrola patch

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

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 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.
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 ? 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 ?) 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 ?)

	   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 !
bzalstein> 
bzalstein> Regards,
bzalstein> Barak.
bzalstein> 
	   Regards

	   Pierre

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