From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2012 23:09:45 +0200

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 10:32 PM, Antony Stone
<Antony.Stone_at_rockbox.open.source.it> wrote:
>> First of all, Is it free?
>
> Does that actually matter? If someone has it installed on their machine, it
> would make sense to enable it to be selected - whether it's free or not?

Yes, it actually does matter:

We need to be able to build Rockbox Utility using the free toolchain
we're using. As it stands we need to use gcc to compile Rockbox
Utility for Windows, since the MS compiler doesn't support some
language features we're using (it is possible to build Rockbox Utility
with MSVC using a couple of tricks but that (a) causes a dependency on
additional dynamic libraries we would need to distribute and (b)
causes crashes in a couple of places that would need to get fixed
first. These crashes are the result of some code getting loaded as DLL
instead of being compiled into Rockbox Utility and not bugs in Rockbox
Utility per se). Btw, the compiler issue / availability of the SDK is
also the main problem holding back bootloader support for the Gigabeat
S in Rockbox Utility though it's the WMP SDK in that case.

Having that said, Rockbox Utility doesn't support SAPI either since
we're not able to support it using the tools we need to build it. To
be able supporting SAPI it uses a trick: the SAPI functionality is
implemented in a vbs script Rockbox Utility bundles and runs.

So if someone provides a vbs script (or similar that "simply runs" on
Windows without being a binary) for this Speech Platform 11 we could
add support. However, including a binary built someway different is
out of question for licensing reasons. If it needs a separate binary
we could of course call it separately like we do with espeak on Linux.

And as a last question: what is the benefit of using the Speech
Platform 11 over SAPI? I had a short look at the MS website but didn't
find anything that would justify the work. As far as I can tell it's
just a different API. But maybe I haven't looked at the right spot?


 - Dominik
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Received on 2012-09-05