Dear Trent Buck and Festival users in Debian and Ubuntu, I have applied a commit to the git repository for Debian festival, currently located at:
anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tts/festival.git The patch provides a compatibility module (known as hts21_engine) to allow festival 2.1 to use older HTS 2.1 voices such as the very popular nitech voices. The patch must be compiled into festival. To use the older voices a very slight change of two lines must be made to the voice. These lines are in a file in the festvox directory of the voice but the name of the file changes from voice to voice. The lines to be replaced are the following: (require 'hts) must be replaced with: (require 'hts21compat) and the line: (Parameter.set 'Synth_Method 'HTS) must be replaced with: (Parameter.set 'Synth_Method 'HTS21) Please note the compatibility module is intended to operate separately and in parallel with the modern HTS engine known as "hts_engine". There is no need to modify newer HTS 2.1.1 voices. They use "hts_engine". We recommend that users move to newer voices when available as the "hts21_engine" may not be ported to future releases in Debian of festival. The git repository will be pushed to unstable and thence testing whenever the usual upload occurs. In the meantime feel free to compile and build the package directly from our source git repository. This compatibility module can in principle be applied to Debian squeeze and/or released versions of Ubuntu with appropriate compiling. Please contact me if you wish to do this. with the very best of regards, Peter
