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 - the author and
maintainer are the same)
* 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 speeds 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 market for
formant synthesizers. If we can encourage TTS developers of natural
speech engines, both open-source and proprietary, to use libsonic,
then natural speech TTS engines will have far less 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. Being accepted in Debian I feel is the single most
important step in this direction.
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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