RFS: sonic
Dear mentors,
I am looking for a sponsor for my package "sonic".
* Package name : sonic
Version : 0.1.9
Upstream Author : Bill Cox (this is a native package)
* URL : http://vinux-project.org/gitweb/?p=sonic.git;a=summary
* License : LGPL
Section : sound
It builds these binary packages:
libsonic0 - Simple library to speed up or slow down speech
libsonic0-dev - Header file for linking to libsonic
sonic - Simple utility to speed up or slow down speech
The package appears to be lintian clean.
My motivation for maintaining this package is: Sonic greatly improves
the quality of automatically sped up speech, relative to other
packages already in Debian, for any speed over 2X. This is very
important to speed listeners, such as many blind people who can listen
at up to 6X speed up. It is also important in audio book
applications. Being in Debian will help advertise this package to
audio book and TTS developers, and help developers feel more at ease
depending on this new package. As things stand now, it's only
available in Vinux, making it more difficult for developers using
other Debian based distros to discover and use this package.
I believe TTS engines are trending to "natural" speech, using actual
voice samples. Today, most of these engines suffer from unacceptable
distortion at high speeds (over 2X). Long term, the blind may be
forced to use these engines, as there is very little value in formant
synthesizers in the marketplace. If we can encourage TTS developers
of natural speech engines, both open-source and proprietary, to use
libsonic, then natural speech TTS engines will not suffer from high
distortion at high speeds, greatly improving productivity for speed
listeners. As the market for blind people is tiny, TTS engine
developers have little incentive to put work into supporting high
speed. This is why it is so important to reduce the barrier for
libsonic integration as much as possible.
The package can be found on mentors.debian.net:
- URL: http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/s/sonic
- Source repository: deb-src http://mentors.debian.net/debian unstable
main contrib non-free
- dget http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/s/sonic/sonic_0.1.9.dsc
I would be glad if someone uploaded this package for me.
Kind regards
Bill Cox
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