Re: festival and gnome-speech

[George Kraft <gk4 austin ibm com>]

Draikes,

Gnopernicus, gnome-speech, and festival work as expected using a
pristine Fedore Core 3 "workstation" setup.  It's the newly built Gnome
2.10 on Fedora using the stock festival-1.4.2-25 that is giving me
fits.  :-) Below are the things that I have tried, but they have not
helped me to identify my problem.


________________________________________________________________________
TEST SOUND

Test the playing of sound using the ALSA sound player:

aplay /usr/share/system-config-soundcard/sound-sample.wav

If sound is not working on a ThinkPad, then see ALSA Mixer fix below.

SOUND CARD

Run system-config-soundcard to see what sound card and device driver is
being used. If the snd-intel8x0 driver is being used on a ThinkPad, then
see the ALSA Mixer work around below.

DESKTOP SOUNDS

To turn on and off desktop sounds, then run gnome-sound-properties. On
the "general" tab, select "enable sound server startup", then select
"sounds for events".

TEST FESTIVAL CLIENT

The Festival text-to-speech client can be tested in command line mode:

lsb_release -d | tee /dev/tty | festival -b --tts

TEST SPEECH

Run gnome-speech's test-speech to test a system registered speech
synthesis system:

test-speech
      
starts the gnome-speech
test tool
1

selects the first
registered speech
synthesis system
m

selects a male voice
all

lists the registered
voices
1

selects the first
registered voice
0

you should hear "good
bye"

TRACE FESTIVAL SERVER

The Festival Server can be run manually to be traced a little to
understand what it is doing:

strace /opt/gnome2/bin/festival-synthesis-driver

________________________________________________________________________

ALSA MIXER

It has been reported that sound sometimes does not work on IBM ThinkPads
when using the snd-intel8x0 driver.

      * Open a terminal window and run /usr/bin/alsamixer
      * Use a right arrow key to move focus to "Headphone Jack Sense".
      * Press 'M' to mute it.
      * Do the same and mute "Line Jack Sense" too.
      * Press the Esc key to exit alsamixer.
      * 
http://www.cactus.org/~gk4/howto/howto-test-sound.html

George (gk4)