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cheve	2011-04-26 , 04:01
Posts: 362 \| Thanked: 143 times \| Joined on Mar 2008	#621

Originally Posted by kureyon

I use mbrola on my desktop. The quality is much better than the espeak (esqueak ?) ones.

hi, would you comment/help on what I did wrong with my 'test' install above(post #620)?

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	woody14619	2011-04-26 , 05:43
	Posts: 1,455 \| Thanked: 3,309 times \| Joined on Dec 2009 @ Rochester, NY	#622

Originally Posted by cheve

It appears that if you would add the option of embedding the language voice string(eg. mb-en1, mb-us2); then user can setup espeak+mbrola himself and he would have a better sounding voice for navigation.

First off: YOU ARE AWESOME!
Thanks for the find on how to augment espeak with these alternate voices. I'd thank you multiple times if I could, as the default voice tends to grate on me a bit.

As for setting the voice for modrana, you can just change the default setting for espeak. For example, to use us1 (the female voice) after following your download instructions above, simply type:

Code:

cd /opt/espeak/data/voices
mv default default.old
ln -s mb/mb-us1 default

I now have ModRana (and all my apps that use espeak) using a soft female voice with a gentle US accent. Very nice!

FYI: In reply to something someone wrote about festival. Yes, festival is there for the N900, but it's a direct compile of the N820 port, and is slightly busted on the N900. If you tell it to make an output wav file, it works just fine. But if you let it default to piping it out to the system speakers, it sounds like a fly buzzing. (Think super-sped-up alien on the old Star Trek series.)

Last edited by woody14619; 2011-04-26 at 05:50.

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cheve	2011-04-26 , 10:59
Posts: 362 \| Thanked: 143 times \| Joined on Mar 2008	#623

thanks, I only know enough to be dangerous

and it is great that our espeak maintainer has kept arm version of espeak up-to-date.

What I did seems ok, however, I don't think it is 'clean' enough. I think the mbrola file should be on its own folder instead of the /sbin.

I am hoping for those who have more experiences can help out and to make the install steps better. As indicated in my end of post 620, I got some messages after running the command at the terminal. I think that should be look at; but it is beyond my skill level at this point.

thank you for your code, that means we don't have to bother MartinK and other voice-app author so they will have more time to give us other cool features.

cheers,

Last edited by cheve; 2011-04-26 at 17:26.

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	woody14619	2011-04-26 , 20:38
	Posts: 1,455 \| Thanked: 3,309 times \| Joined on Dec 2009 @ Rochester, NY	#624

Originally Posted by cheve

What I did seems ok, however, I don't think it is 'clean' enough. I think the mbrola file should be on its own folder instead of the /sbin.

I put it in /usr/bin, along with the espeak binary. Figure if the path includes espeak, it would that way also include mbrola.

/sbin is usually root only, so it may have problems with running things from user if you put i there.

Originally Posted by cheve

thank you for your code, that means we don't have to bother MartinK and other voice-app author so they will have more time to give us other cool features.

I agree.

But having it as an option as well, like a generic "speech string" would be nice. The default could be espeak "%s" then if you want to customize the voice (or use a separate speech program entirely), it's a simple options setting?

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MartinK	2011-04-26 , 20:51
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#625

Originally Posted by woody14619

I agree. But having it as an option as well, like a generic "speech string" would be nice. The default could be espeak "%s" then if you want to customize the voice (or use a separate speech program entirely), it's a simple options setting?

Is it possible to specify a custom path to the mbrola voices to espeak ? If so, I could make modRana look into a folder in MyDocs, say MyDocs/mbrola_voices and modify the espeak command-line parameters appropriately if it finds some mbrola files there.

GUI editable espeak string should be also doable

__________________
modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
Mieru: a flexible manga and comic book reader
Universal Components - a solution for native looking yet component set independent QML appliactions (QtQuick Controls 2 & Silica supported as backends)

Last edited by MartinK; 2011-04-26 at 20:54.

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cheve	2011-04-27 , 01:51
Posts: 362 \| Thanked: 143 times \| Joined on Mar 2008	#626

Originally Posted by MartinK

Is it possible to specify a custom path to the mbrola voices to espeak ? If so, I could make modRana look into a folder in MyDocs, say MyDocs/mbrola_voices and modify the espeak command-line parameters appropriately if it finds some mbrola files there.

GUI editable espeak string should be also doable

imho, a GUI editable espeak string would be a better choice - this way should keep modRana more or less independent to future changes to mbrola or espeak.

cheers,

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	woody14619	2011-04-27 , 18:48
	Posts: 1,455 \| Thanked: 3,309 times \| Joined on Dec 2009 @ Rochester, NY	#627

Originally Posted by MartinK

Is it possible to specify a custom path to the mbrola voices to espeak ? If so, I could make modRana look into a folder in MyDocs, say MyDocs/mbrola_voices and modify the espeak command-line parameters appropriately if it finds some mbrola files there.

GUI editable espeak string should be also doable

The problem is the layout isn't easy to navigate. The files for mbrola themselves live in one of two places, and it's different on the N900 that other places due to opt-ify (/opt/espeak/data/mbrola/ I think). But just having them there isn't enough... You need to exec as well, and the default setup files that come with espeak may need to be tweaked, depending on the version.

Much better to make ModRana more program independent by simply allowing the command string itself to be edited for voice out. This is one of those "set it once" type things that most people aren't ever going to play with, but those that do will want more power than a drop-down.

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	woody14619	2011-05-03 , 00:24
	Posts: 1,455 \| Thanked: 3,309 times \| Joined on Dec 2009 @ Rochester, NY	#628

Ok... Two problems.

One: In mod_voice.py, you call out the voice to use, so even if you override the voice, it defaults back to the language locally set. Also, calling out a mbrola voice from there (changing the voice to mb-us1) fails. BUT if you remove the voice option all together, if it defaults to mbrola via the link like above, it works fine.

The code I removed is in red in mod_voice.py:

Code:

56:  self.espaekProcess = subprocess.Popen(['espeak', languageParam, '-s 120','-m','"%s"' % output])
70: self.espaekProcess = subprocess.Popen(['espeak', languageParam, '-s 120','-m','"%s"' % text])

Two: There's a problem with tile caching in sqlite.

After about 3000 tiles get loaded, when it tries to load from the sqlite database, it fails and re-downloads. The log keeps saying:

Code:

loading the image buffer from sqlite to pixbuf failed:Unrecognized image file format

And after, it looks like it re-opens the database, then say is sql commit went OK, but if I close and re-load, it fails the same way. Interestingly, when I first start up, since I'm in the same area as the initial tile download (the first tiles the db has), it works fine. Only once I go to the area past the first thousand tiles or so do I get this error.

Attached is the run log. If you'd like a copy of the zipped sqlite database set, let me know. It's just under 1M.

Attached Files

Log.txt (7.7 KB, 96 views)

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MartinK	2011-05-04 , 00:37
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#629

First, release announcement:
modRana V0.25-1 is out !
Whats new ?

map rotation and overlay should both be much faster & more efficient
turn-by-turn messages now use big font & line wrapping
- when a part of the message is cut off for space reasons, a small scissors icon shows ap - clicking it displays the full message in a notification
- the previous/next/hide buttons should now be better visible
the voice CLI string can be now edited, directly from the GUI see below for a howto
there is now a POI search preset for EV Charging stations (in the Travel category)
some icon updates
some bugged notifications now properly show up (POI adding, batch download complete, etc.)
various other bugfixes & "backend" improvements

Yeah and sorry for such a long release delay

Originally Posted by woody14619

Ok... Two problems.

One: In mod_voice.py, you call out the voice to use, so even if you override the voice, it defaults back to the language locally set...

It is now (V0.25) possible to directly edit the CLI string from the GUI - just go to Options->Sound->Voice and set "Voice parameters" to "manual"

The string can be directly edited in an entry dialog & there is a button for reseting the string to default value

The string can contain various keywords:
%language% - this will be replaced by current language code
%message% - replaced by message without quotes
%qmessage% - replaced by current message without quotes

So basically, if your espeak uses the mbrola voices by default, you can now just remove -v and the %language% keyword from the string.

Also, using the %message% variable, prefixes and suffixes can be easily added:
"espeak -v %language% -s 120 -m 'Simon says: %message%'"

And because modRana just executes the resulting string in terminal, the possibilities are basically endless (calling custom scripts, other CLI speech engines, etc.).

Originally Posted by woody14619

Two: There's a problem with tile caching in sqlite. After about 3000 tiles get loaded, when it tries to load from the sqlite database, it fails and re-downloads. The log keeps saying:
Code:
loading the image buffer from sqlite to pixbuf failed:Unrecognized image file format
And after, it looks like it re-opens the database, then say is sql commit went OK, but if I close and re-load, it fails the same way. Interestingly, when I first start up, since I'm in the same area as the initial tile download (the first tiles the db has), it works fine. Only once I go to the area past the first thousand tiles or so do I get this error.

Attached is the run log. If you'd like a copy of the zipped sqlite database set, let me know. It's just under 1M.

Yep, the "broken" database should definitely help me debug this

It might help if you also include your current settings file (/opt/modrana/data/options.bin) - eq. I can test in the same environment, settings-wise.

Technically, the database is designed to hold millions upon millions of tiles (it is split to a indexing and storage databases, new storage db is added once the last one reaches about 3.7 GB, thus avoiding the FAT32 file size limit and the separate indexing database provides fast lookup). Of course, the tile storage code is quite complex and the sqlite version shipped with Python 2.5 is quite temperamental, so there is quite likely a bug somewhere.

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bipinbn	2011-05-04 , 06:30
Posts: 92 \| Thanked: 95 times \| Joined on Feb 2010 @ Smyrna, Atlanta / Bangalore, India	#630

@Martin

thank you for the latest update...its much faster and smooth now..

Just wanted to point you to one issue which needs to be sorted out..

When i do a point-point routing and after the route is calculated i go into route info page and see the text containing origin and destination info is messed up. I think reducing the font size to fit in the text should fix this. Please check the screen shot below:

Thanks again for your efforts