From: Hussein Patwa <hspatwa_at_talktalk.net>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:41:15 +0100

> Subject: Re: Problems making voice with cygwin
>
> Problems making voice with cygwinHi Hussein,
>
> I can't help with your Cygwin problem, but have you tried
> using RbUtil to build voices?
> http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebSearch?topic=Roc
> kboxUtility
> for details, or
> http://download.rockbox.org/rbutil/win32/rbutilqt-v1.0.4.zip
> for the Windows binary.

Hello,

I have finally managed to create a voice file using my own SAPI voice and
which has been confirmed as fully functional on four different platforms to
date. Please bear with me - I know this list is archived and also Google
indexed so I'm going to give my findings in case it helps others in the
future.

I think it depends highly on which voice you use. A Cepstral voice I was
trying previously would never generate. However, since I switched to
Loquendo this morning, no problems. Both were SAPI5 compliant voices.

The rockbox utility is not accessible by screen readers, therefore Cygwin is
my only viable alternative as will be the case for many partially sighted
users (unless one has sighted assistance or whishes to indulge in eyestrain
and headaches). I know cygwin is not natively discussed on this list,
however please let me cover a couple of points that are relevant.

It is often necessary to increase the memory allocation for cygwin. I had
to do this, as I was constantly receiving allocation errors which did not
occur with more basic housekeeping tasks. The cygwin command for this is:
regtool -i set /HKLM/Software/Cygnus\ Solutions/Cygwin/heap_chunk_in_mb 1024

1024 should suffice for most systems, although you can increase it. There
have been reports of values higher than 2048 failing to substantiate.
Execute the command from within cygwin, then restart cygwin to take effect.

I have found the voice generation is sometimes erratic. It's best to run it
at least a couple of times to ensure your output file is the same size.
Generation is sometimes incomplete with no error messages to indicate as
such.

There have been reports on this list about voices being 'incomplete' in
their coverage of targets' relating to unspoken menu items, property values
and the speech output of file/directory name characters. No solution or
reason for this has been given, and being someone who isn't fond of loose
ends, I've been trying to find a fix. I've been unsuccessful in finding a
conclusive solution so far. The above points have worked for me thus far -
if I find out anything else which could be causing the fault, I'll be sure
to let you know.

Thanks for bearing with me, and thanks for your help and advice thus far.

Cheers,

H.

Kind Regards and Best Wishes

Hussein Patwa
Tel: 01224 783228
Mobile: 0789 47 595 62
Web: www.patwanet.co.uk

Find me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/p/Hussein_Patwa/510013486
Received on 2008-04-01