Festival Lite - flite

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Preamble

2010-12-30 - For some time now I have been quietly fascinated in the digital process of converting 'text' to spoken speech. At some stage earlier I experimented, in WIN32, with the University of Edinburgh's Festival, or the Debian release package Festival, but did not really get anywhere in a WIN32 context...

Then recently the FlightGear development list contained a pointer to a 'Festival Lite', perhaps starting with the Debian flite 1.2  package, and continued by the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), to flite 1.4, October 2009. This was not too difficult to compile in an XP WIN32 machine, using MSVC8 (2005).

I was able to download, and compile 'flite 1.4' in both Ubuntu (linux), and MicroSoft Windows XP, using MSVC8 (2005), and it worked ;=)) Running (in XP) -
> bin\flite_main "A big hello to the world" hello.wav
produced the following sound file -

To listen, click [Play]

If your browser has a way to 'play' WAV files, perhaps through Quicktime, or some other 'association' with .wav, then you should hear the phrase repeated until stopped...


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Building with MSVC8 (2005)

The source comes with MSVC sln/vcproj files, but I chose not to use these. They seem to take a multiple DLL approach, and for this test I wanted a static library, so set about building my own MSVC DSW/DSP build set, in a new 'msvc' folder. In this regard I used my perl scripts, createdsp, to create the relevant build files.

So it should be a simple matter to load 'flites.dsw' into the MSVC version of your choice, allow it to convert these to its own format, and build the projects... The executables are placed in 'msvc\bin', and the static libraries in 'msvc\lib'...

There is a test-flite.bat batch file to run some quick test on the Release version of flite_main.exe...


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Downloads

Take care downloading and running executables from the web!

Key: flite-1.4-xxxx.zip
org contains the original flite-1.4-release.tar.bz2
src my complete WIN32 (modified) source.
msvc just the new 'msvc' folder contents
binR Release executables
libR Release lib_flite.lib static library
binB Both Release and Debug executables
libB Both Release and Debug static libraries.
Date Link Size MD5
2010/12/30 flite-1.4-binR.zip 12,376,565 5a50cba2c157a08ab26ee142ed6f9bae
2010/12/30 flite-1.4-libR.zip 10,334,752 19eb7aeab7a5c600cc1784f3b2af8e5e
2010/12/30 flite-1.4-binB.zip 25,517,214 9c3be2f13671068cf02048371e1e49cf
2010/12/30 flite-1.4-libB.zip 21,744,881 3c05afc75f889f420905e66754ab988c
(a) Original flite-1.4-release.tar.bz2
2010/12/25 flite-1.4-org.zip 15,042,073 6fa49cea13c49c5ccf5cdb498bd2986f
(b) patched with
2010/12/30 flite-1.4-patch.txt 24,285 patch to be applied to original
and (c) add the new 'msvc' folder
2010/12/30 flite-1.4-msvc.zip 19,126 fa3449bce710e2e2398795d293137831
= full WIN32 source = a + b + c
2010/12/30 flite-1.4-src.zip 21,860,329 3781ff836ba148fb2290045eb2d0ac6e

That is, the flite-1.4-patch.txt could be applied to flite-1.4-org.zip, and flite-1.4-msvc.zip unzipped, creating the new folder 'msvc', and this should be the SAME as flite-1.4-src.zip ;=))


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