Even if someone managed to port a linux tts engine such as festival to the empeg, I still think that prerecorded tts is a better solution. You pretty much know in advance what its going to say so there is no point in forcing the cpu to do that. And also tts voices for windows are currently of higher quality then the linux ones, especially the AT&T natural voices and even the voices by L&H, IBM, and Microsoft.

The CSV file does contain the FID for each song, so pcm files with the same FID can be created. I believe in order to get TTS to work on the empeg just a few changes need to be made to hijack:
1. It would need to monitor what the current song playing is
2. When the song changes to a new song it should see if a pcm file with the same FID exists in the tts folder (the tts folder should be a config.ini option)
3. If a pcm file for that FID exists it should send the pause key to the player to prevent the new song from starting right away.
4. It should then play the pcm file.
5. After the pcm file finishes playing it should send the pause key to the player again to resume playback of the song.

Well if anyone is willing to handle that linux side of this give me the word and I'll have the windows side of it (CSV to TTS to PCM) working in less then a week:

The actual text spoken in the pcm file, the voice engine and font used, and the speech tempo will all be customizable by the user. So one person can have the female British English from L&H say "Now playing %title% by %artist%" and another user can have the "Mike" voice from Microsoft say "Playing track %track% from %album% by %artist%. %title%" It will also give the option of teaching it to pronounce certain words that it mispronounces.

Most engines except the ones by IBM and AT&T as far as I know are capable of writing the TTS to a file much faster then they normally speak. So it actually shouldn't more then a couple of minutes to convert the CSV music database into PCM files.

Also, most TTS engines for windows have a 11Khz sample rate, with some being at 8, 16, and 22Khz. They are all mono. If someone could make a version of pcmplay that can play 11Khz mono instead of 44Khz stereo that would save a lot of wasted space, the file size of the pcm would be 8 times smaller and there would be no change in quality.

What is the interest level in the empeg community to getting TTS as I described working?