Christian Schoenebeck <christian.schoenebeck@epost.de> [2002-10-12 12:40:45 +0200]:
> Since I bought a new mainboard festival talks way too fast.
It is specific to certain sound cards. I have never had a problem
with a good sound card such as a SoundBlaster or Live! but with cheap
on motherboard audio I have had that problem. Going to the Edinburgh
festival site and you will see the links to the FAQs. Without looking
at anything other than the festival README you might believe the US
site and the UK sites would be mirrors of each other. They are not.
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
Following the directions in the FAQ this solved the problem for me. I
will include the FAQ entry verbatim here at the end of the message.
They seem to blame cheap hardware but I am suspicious. It sounds more
like a software problem to me. Especially because their suggestion of
using an external player like sox can handle it fine.
I had to increase the volume with my particular hardware and ended up
using the sox '-v' option on my particular hardware in order to get
enough sound level out. You might need or want to try that option to
sox too.
Bob
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/cgi-bin/lists.cgi?config=festival_faq&entry=arunning_festival/speed.html
This seems to happen with linux and sound hardware which cannot
natively support mono audio. In the past if mono audio was sent to a
stereo-only sound card, the driver would send a copy to both channels,
now it splits it between the channels, effectively doubling the
speaking rate and raising the pitch by an octave.
It is left to the audio application to now check the hardware and send
something that it can handle. Until festival's audio code is updated
this will cause problems with some hardware.
There are 2 quick fixes: An expensive one and a cheap one.
1. The expensive one is to get a decent sound card. This problem
seems to occur mostly with cheap on-motherboard sound
devices. Buy a reasonably priced SB16 or something.
2. The cheap fix is to use and external play program (like play
from the sox package)
Create the file festival/lib/siteinit.scm (if you don't already
have it) and add the following
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "sox -t raw -sw -r $SR $FILE -c2 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp")
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