Re: Emulating a hardware synth (was:buying used hardware synth)

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 19:26 +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Lukas Loehrer, le Tue 02 Jan 2007 13:09:13 +0100, a écrit :
> > I was wondering if there is a program that would allow
> > one to use a second computer as a hardware synth. What I mean is: Say
> > I had two machines A and B connected via a parallel cable. Now I want
> > to install a distribution with a speakup enabled installation process
> > on machine A, is there a program I can run on machine B that reads for
> > example dectalk commands from the parallel or serial port an then uses
> > a software synth to do the actual tts. Thus, machine B emulates a
> > hardware synth in software.
> Maybe speech dispatcher has a way to do this.

Speech Dispatcher supports this on its level (network and SSIP), but
this is not what you want in this case.

But I think it could be really easy. I don't think we need any new code.
SpeechD-Up currently reads Speakups output from /dev/softsynth and the
command set in use is modified DecTalk. So my idea would be to install
SpeechD-Up and Speech Dispatcher on the B machine, start it so that it
reads input from /dev/ttyS0 instead of /dev/softsynth and configure
Speakup on machine A to talk in DecTalk commands. Another parameter you
need to pass to SpeechD-Up on machine A is -t (--dont-init-tables) so
that it doesn't try to access the local /proc/ filesystem.

I don't think it will ,,just work'' as it has never been tested and I'm
not sure exactly what will be the differences between
accessing /dev/ttyS0 in this case and /dev/softsynth. I hope somebody
can explain it to me. I'm CCing Kirk Reiser and the Speakup mailing
list.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke