Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 cce.zizkov AT volny.cz wrote:

> On 23 Sep 04 at 4:00, keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org wrote:
>
> > I just installed this (with pkg) in the latest BL3 and it all worked (with
> > defaults for sb.o).  I ran the 'test' and played the 'welcome.wav' with play
> > and tried out 'say' on files and words.  I heard 'test' count to ten in
> > Czech.  But when I use 'say' on other files they all have a Czech accent!
> > Is this a Czech program?  The final voiced sounds (d) become unvoiced (t).
> > th sounds like f.
>
> 1. Did you try command line options?

Yes, I used play with a .wav file and say with a text file (English 
numbers) and a word.  I don't have any MP3 files and would have to make 
some first.  Ron steered me to DOS cdtowav.zip and bladeenc.zip (to make 
wav into mp3).  He said there are linux versions of these too, and some 
other wav to mp3 programs (faac and lame), which I found for both libc6 
and libc5.  It might be fun to try them with BL3 but I hope Ron will do 
this first.


> The Czech numbers are heavily tweaked, the source file is
> written phonetically, whereas the English numbers are written
> in ordinary English words.

Czech words are witten mostly phonetically.  You can pronounce them 
without many rules.  You just need to know that voiced consonants become 
unvoiced in some positions (before another unvoiced consonsant or at the 
end of a word).  What do you mean about writing the source file 
phonetically?

> > The quality is about that of the little program that comes from
> > Creative, whose name I forget.  Not quite as good as the local
> > weather forecast. Thanks for sharing your work.

It is sbtalk.

> It is amazing how this very small program can work at all with
> English language that hardly has any pronounciation rules.
> The website where I looked for download was at a German university.
> I am afraid that 'say' has been just a toy and has not been devoloped
> further. But there are probably rules, conventions, and scientific
> approaches to do something similar on a higher level, eg. for the
> visual impaired.

I ran across one free adaptation of IE that talked.  Has anyone come up 
with a linux talking browser?  Links or lynx seem like better candidates 
for someone with no vision at all, but I suppose a graphical browser is 
better for people with some vision.

> Here are two more sound topics:
>
> 2. Yesterday I tried to record a wav file from an analog input in BL2.
> The recording script (not yet uncluded in my sound packet) makes use
> of sox and aumix (in BL2 I use even smaller program called umix). So
> it should work in BL3, too. Recording, however, presumes that you
> have several hundereds of MB room on your hard disk partitions. If
> you want to edit wav files, even more. And this is probably is
> nothing for low-end processors, either.

Was aumix tested in your test program?  I did not notice a readme file 
about it.

> 3. Obviously beyond BL is editing wav files. Here, GUI and using
> mouse makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately I I was not able to compile
> any of those smaller or larger applications available on the web. The
> ordinary Slackware 7.1 environment seemed not be sufficient. Compiler
> complained mainly about the GTK version (or its installation?). In
> the end I found a binary taon-0.6b that does everything I need, but
> works only in BL2, source is not available. This could be posted as
> BL2 add-on. What do you think, Steven?
>
> Christof
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Christof Lange <cce.zizkov AT volny.cz>
> Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
> phone: (+420) 222 78 06 73 / 222 78 20 02 / 603 18 87 53
> http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
>
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org