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#208589 - 09/03/2004 12:17 Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock
tms13
old hand

Registered: 30/07/2001
Posts: 1115
Loc: Lochcarron and Edinburgh
I've had TTS Clock for a while now, and it's cool to hear it at startup. But the US female voice is starting to grate. I'm not Michael Knight, and my car is not a black sports thing! So I've installed Festival along with a British voice onto my Linux workstation. But now I need to generate the set of PCM files to go in /drive0/var/tts, and I can't find the set of inputs to Festival. I've looked on Domokun's web site, but there's nothing in the way of sources to generate the PCM files, so I'm asking here. If I have to re-do all of his work to re-generate the samples, then so be it, but I'd rather save the time for something more entertaining.

BTW, I also discovered a stray carriage-return at the end of line 19 of the script, which gives "': not a valid identifieropts: `Option" errors on the console. Removing the carriage-return makes the error message go away.
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#208590 - 09/03/2004 16:27 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: tms13]
SE_Sport_Driver
carpal tunnel

Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
I think he used Cool Edit www.cooledit.com to convert the WAV's into PCM. Looks like he did it all by hand here. I think Cool Edit is PC only however..
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#208591 - 09/03/2004 17:28 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: tms13]
Major_Sarcasm
member

Registered: 28/08/2003
Posts: 149
Loc: Isle of Wight, UK
If you do manage to get a british voice on all those TTS samples, would you share?

No disrespect to our American friends, but I would prefer to hear a more familiar accent first thing in the morning...
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Steve

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#208592 - 09/03/2004 19:11 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: tms13]
genixia
Carpal Tunnel

Registered: 08/02/2002
Posts: 3411
I'm guessing that sox could write them.
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#208593 - 09/03/2004 19:49 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: tms13]
Daria
carpal tunnel

Registered: 24/01/2002
Posts: 3937
Loc: Providence, RI
But the US female voice is starting to grate. I'm not Michael Knight, and my car is not a black sports thing!


KITT was voiced by William Daniels, so even if you were Michael Knight or drove a black sports car I wouldn't expect to hear a US female voice.

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#208594 - 09/03/2004 21:56 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: tms13]
gryng
stranger

Registered: 27/09/2000
Posts: 48
You could use SOX to convert WAV to PCM. But if it's already 44.1khz 16bit stereo WAVs, then you can just take out (I think) the first 64 bytes. For the most part, stripping the WAV header (whatever it is) is the same as a PCM (to my knowledge), as long as the base parameters (sampling rate, channels, etc.) are the same.

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#208595 - 10/03/2004 07:48 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: tms13]
tms13
old hand

Registered: 30/07/2001
Posts: 1115
Loc: Lochcarron and Edinburgh
Thanks for all the advice. I don't have Windows, so CoolEdit is out of the question. I've had a play with Festival, generating WAV output and converting with sox:

all: $(subst .txt,.pcm,$(wildcard *.txt))

%.wav: %.txt
[tab] /usr/bin/text2wave $< >$@
[tab] /usr/bin/normalize $@ 2>&-


%.pcm: %.wav
[tab] /usr/bin/sox $< -t raw -r 44100 -w -c 2 $@ resample -qs

clean:
[tab] rm -f *.pcm *.wav


The speech quality is quite a long way short of the distributed TTS Clock, though - adequate for reading emails, say, but not for something I hear every day. I think I ought to investigate the alternative of persuading a friend to record the samples. I don't have studio-quality (or in fact any) recording gear, though, so it may take a while.
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#208596 - 10/03/2004 11:32 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: tms13]
AndrewT
old hand

Registered: 16/02/2002
Posts: 867
Loc: Oxford, UK
Domokun linked this site a while ago for generating online text-to-speech.

I had a play (so to speak) with UK-English Audrey and she sounded pretty good I even started to make replacement sound files for Domokun's TTS clock but gave up due to lack of time.

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#208597 - 10/03/2004 12:19 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: AndrewT]
peter
carpal tunnel

Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4169
Loc: Cambridge, England
Someone should make an audio version of http://www.humanclock.com ...

Peter

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#336763 - 05/09/2010 20:21 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: peter]
JeepBastard
enthusiast

Registered: 08/09/1999
Posts: 364
Loc: Brooklyn
Anyone remember how to convert WAV to PCM successfully under windows? Didn't have luck with sox quite yet.
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#336764 - 05/09/2010 21:37 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: JeepBastard]
JimCamel
journeyman

Registered: 30/06/2008
Posts: 63
Have you tried Goldwave?

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#336773 - 06/09/2010 11:12 Re: Creating new PCM files for TTS Clock [Re: JimCamel]
JeepBastard
enthusiast

Registered: 08/09/1999
Posts: 364
Loc: Brooklyn
Thanks Jim!

This is the closest I've gotten. PCM 32 bit Signed Stereo - but it comes out a bit sped up and higher octave than the original. 24 and 16 bit and 8 bit all sound garbled.

Downloaded it, still trying to figure out the settings for the PCM that tts/pcmplay will use. So far sounds garbled or sped up. It's been so long I forgot!
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