Change default voice in festival

[solomonson]

I read this post and was able to get the voices working, but when I change the .festivalrc file to have (voice.select 'nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts) it seems ignored. Am I missing something?

I also tried (set! voice_default 'nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts), but that gives errors.

Any hints?

[cariboo]

Moved from Tips & Tuts to General Help.

[ki3456]

I read this post and was able to get the voices working, but when I change the .festivalrc file to have (voice.select 'nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts) it seems ignored. Am I missing something?

I also tried (set! voice_default 'nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts), but that gives errors.

Any hints?

I had the same problem. I didn't mind at the start but when I tried to pipe wave output to neroAacEnc nero recognized the wave header for default voice only.

I opened /usr/share/festival/voices.scm as super user
There is a function in there called default-voice-priority-list
originally it looked like this:

(defvar default-voice-priority-list
'(kal_diphone
cmu_us_bdl_arctic_hts
cmu_us_jmk_arctic_hts
cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts
cmu_us_awb_arctic_hts
; cstr_rpx_nina_multisyn ; restricted license (lexicon)
; cstr_rpx_jon_multisyn ; restricted license (lexicon)
; cstr_edi_awb_arctic_multisyn ; restricted license (lexicon)
; cstr_us_awb_arctic_multisyn
ked_diphone
don_diphone
rab_diphone
en1_mbrola
us1_mbrola
us2_mbrola
us3_mbrola
gsw_diphone ;; not publically distributed
el_diphone
)
"default-voice-priority-list
List of voice names. The first of them available becomes the default voice.")

I added my preferred voice and saved:

(defvar default-voice-priority-list
'(nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts
kal_diphone
cmu_us_bdl_arctic_hts
cmu_us_jmk_arctic_hts
cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts
cmu_us_awb_arctic_hts
; cstr_rpx_nina_multisyn ; restricted license (lexicon)
; cstr_rpx_jon_multisyn ; restricted license (lexicon)
; cstr_edi_awb_arctic_multisyn ; restricted license (lexicon)
; cstr_us_awb_arctic_multisyn
ked_diphone
don_diphone
rab_diphone
en1_mbrola
us1_mbrola
us2_mbrola
us3_mbrola
gsw_diphone ;; not publically distributed
el_diphone
)
"default-voice-priority-list
List of voice names. The first of them available becomes the default voice.")

This is a complete hack. Hope it helps.

[solomonson]

That worked for me too. Thanks for sharing!

BTW: Do you have any idea on how to change the speed of the voice?