Festival in 11.04 exits when it shouldn't and doesn't when it should

[Doug Blank]

Binary package hint: festival

If you run:

$ echo "Hello" | festival --tts

you then have to kill it, but if you enter:

$ festival

and enter something from the command line, it quits:

Festival Speech Synthesis System 2.0.95:beta April 2010
Copyright (C) University of Edinburgh, 1996-2010. All rights reserved.

clunits: Copyright (C) University of Edinburgh and CMU 1997-2010
hts_engine:
The HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)
hts_engine API version 1.03 (http://hts-engine.sourceforge.net/)
Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Nagoya Institute of Technology
              2001-2008 Tokyo Institute of Technology
All rights reserved.
For details type `(festival_warranty)'
festival> (SayText "Hello")
#<Utterance 0x7fcc524c9b10>
festival>
$

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Hellmark (spamtrap-hellmark)]

Still happens in 11.10.

[Hellmark (spamtrap-hellmark)]

Although, now, it quits when you pipe it from echo.

[Carlos Salgado (treebuey)]

Apparently festival configuration files have be customized to be "debian specific". Not sure what that means but I assume it was so it more easily integrated with whatever sound interface is in vogue at the moment.

To do this, it plays a temporary raw audio file it creates using an external program called aplay. aplay is based on the ALSA sound interface and comes in the "alsa-utils" package. It appears aplay causes festival to terminate prematurely. To *me* it appears aplay inserts an EOF into festival's stdin/read stream. ALSA packages have had several changes recently.

changed the second to last line in /etc/festival.scm

FROM:

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")

TO:

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "play -q -c 1 -t s16 -r $SR $FILE")

play comes in the "sox" package. SoX is very robust and well supported.

note that "aplay" is also mentioned in other places in /usr/share/festival/*.scm files. When they come into use I am not sure.

There probably is a better fix, but this does work.

.

[Carlos Salgado (treebuey)]

Additional info

Exclusively use Ultimate Edition versions from UE2.4(Koala) onward This is an offshoot of Ubuntu distributions which attempt to seamlessly add as many of the "best" applications, tweaks and "eyecandy" as possible. Consequently problems are sometimes introduced which are fixable with a bit of effort. Usually add festival afterwards via debian/ubuntu packageing after initial install.

I've had problems with all implementations of UE and festival except for the latest(Precise/UE3.4) which worked fine from the beginning. All having to do with ALSA and/or sound-hardware/sound-server. Something breaks when it's not "standard".

My "fix" appears to solve the problem for the latest versions though it shouldn't be necessary.