Creating a voice with Festvox for Festival in debian/linux

Okay, Debian provides packages for speech-tools, but they aren't complete.  On top of that, the latest package versions provided at festvox.org are of incompatible versions with eachother.  Instead of trying to figure that out, I suggest downloading the svn: http://developer.berlios.de/svn/?group_id=3272

All we care about are speech_tools and

./configure and make them both.

Then start following this tutorial:

http://festvox.org/bsv/x1003.html

However, there might be a few problems.  Recording audio is a little bit funky, as they use na_record, which doesn't support ALSA.  However, hopefully you have oss support enabled.  When you get to the point where you are going to execute bin/prompt_them you might want to modify it first.

the line 

$ESTDIR/bin/na_record -f 16000 -t $duration  wav/$f.wav

can be replaced with

$ESTDIR/bin/na_record -audiodevice /dev/dsp1 -f 16000 -time $duration  wav/$f.wav

if you want to send it to the oss device /dev/dsp1

Or, you can replace it with arecord (which uses ALSA) like so:

arecord -Dplughw:1 -r 16000 -d $duration  wav/$f.wav

(this will record from the ALSA device plughw:1).

You can also uncomment various features inside this file, such as waiting for you to press return before recording, or playing back your recording immediately after you record it.

I'll update this as I encounter more problems.