soft synth

[Hynek Hanke]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 07:10:14PM -0700, Juan Hernandez wrote:
> free or not, what is a good synth?  

I highly encourage you to support Free Software synthesizers.
Free Software needs people to care about it, it needs users,
and if all users will give up the idea for a temporal technical
benefit, libre solutions will never get any better.

I think Festival is quite a good Free Software synthesizer.
It has several voices, is reasonably fast and even supports
some higher level features that the other synthesizers don't
(basic SSML, sound icons, scheme-extensibility).

> I got software speech going on my linux box,
> but I don't care for the responsiveness of flite, any ideas?

I must warn you that you don't get good responsivness on typing keys
with using Speakup for software synthesis output. There is a conceptual
problem in it. I'm working on fixing this.

But I think e.g. speechd-el's responsivness is good with Festival
and that shows that there is no real problem in software
synthesis in general.

> Also, how do I make speakup-dispatcher use different synths?
where is the configuration files/  thanks

Look for DefaultModule and LanguageDefaultModule variables in
speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf in your etc/ directory. The corresponding
modules must be loaded with the line AddModule somewhere in the
file. For problems, examine the logfile in /var/log/speechd.log or
/var/log/speech-dispatcher/.

With Regards,
Hynek Hanke
http://www.freebsoft.org/