speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

Actually, I like sox very much and I use it a lot for basic editing 
tasks.  I also generally prefer the command line.  My first talking 
computer was an Apple II+ with an Echo and a very old version of 
Textalker, so I can relate to poor speech quality.  However, the 
computer industry has progressed far beyond that point, even with 
hardware speech.  There's really no reason to use very low quality 
speech synthesizers anymore.  Note: I am not saying that ESpeak is very 
low quality.  It is better than the Echo, but I'm not sure how much 
better.  Part of the problem is that I am not in the UK and am not used 
to British voices.  It doesn't mispronounce things too badly and it does 
have a fairly low resource overhead.  With that said, I still don't see 
any reason why I should give up my expensive hardware synthesizers and 
why I should be forced into using non-free software speech.

Regarding audio editing, I'm not familiar with soundgrab.  I'll look at 
it.  I do like sox, but it isn't good for very precise editing tasks.  
The command line is great, but when you're dealing with a very small 
amount of audio, such as 0.5 seconds, the command line just doesn't cut 
it.  I recently put together a presentation with music and clips from 
different audio files.  Sox did a great job, but there was a noticable 
lag between files.  I had to create a script with the commands to play 
each clip and it was obvious to me when one ended and the next started.  
With something like Sound Forge, it would've been one smooth 
presentation with no gaps and no lag between clips.  I admit that I'm 
not a sox wizard and there are probably workarounds that I don't know 
about, but it took me much longer to get the command parameters exactly 
right since I couldn't easily cut and paste what I wanted.  It worked 
out well enough in the end though.

Georgina Joyce wrote:
> Well here my LTLK works well on this debian lenny system with speakup.
> I've no interest in using it with orca because I quite like espeak.
> Because my first experience with a talking computere was with HAL and
> the Apollo 1 synth and espeak is considerably better than that to my
> ears.  However, I wanted to point out that quite a bit can be done via
> the console in respect of audio editing.  Perhaps soundgrab and sox
> doesn't attract you but they're a very powerful combination.  But I
> accept that I'm happier on the commandline where as others are better
> with a GUI.  
>