Re:...slightly related: text to speech, pitch adju
on
Turn-Key Linux Audio
·
· Score: 1
1) What would you use to convert (english) sentences to speech samples (in real time, if possible perfomance-wise).
Others already mentioned Festival - and I wholeheartedly recommend it. (Under BSDish license.)
I especially recommend it with the OGI CSLU patch, even when it's not really open source (only for non-commercial use). Festival is great, it sounds nice even with the normal voice set... but this patch makes it sound really great.
I've used this program to read me some looong texts. (I don't want to do unnecessary large printouts, want to spare the batteries of my PDA, and I don't want to wreck my eyes completely with the monitor...) Strangely, the first text I fed through the OGIFestival was some H.P. Lovecraft story that featured artificial voice... =)
I wish they'd make the changes available under the same license as Festival so I could just apt-get the thing, now I need to do some patch tricks to get it up and running =/ But it's still fairly easy to build by following the instructions.
In music downloads, everyone wants MP3. In video downloads, everyone wants MPEG or DivX. In net radio, Real is alive (unfortunately), but Shoutcast and its derivatives, based on MP3 or Ogg, are rising, of course. In streaming video, Real is still doing well. (And are there actually working streaming cross-platform video? And by cross-platform I mean "Has a native Linux client", too - so Quicktime doesn't count =)
I think part of the whole point of releasing the source is to allow people to build their own tools, sans spyware, et al.
Who cares about spyware? What about general user experience? =)
My own experience is that RealPlayer in Linux is far from good. But with Helix DNA Player out there, why isn't anyone bolting that to Xine?
This way, I'd go on any web site that's offering Realvideo content, say open it, Xine would open it - and
have a real full screen mode with Xv hardware scaling (RP8 only supports maximized window, leaving stuff on the edges, and when it decides to resize the window, you're out of luck),
Have working playlist support - that is, one with auto-advance (so that the clueless sites like xenu.net that chop a two-hour program into 10 segments are actually viewable without getting up to start the next segment),
have a LIRC support (no need to get up at all), and
Just have a better UI, dammit!
I'd so much like to watch RealVideo with the same video player that I use for everything else...
...or someone to give a gigantic donation to xenutv.com so that they get fat net connection and ability to publish their stuff as MPEG =)
soon we will see the real juice of these new technologies. And, soon, we will see how they can whitstand against serious attacks, exploits and break-ins.
The strength of the.NET is directly proportional to the strength of the implementation of the.NET. Just because.NET comes on UNIX doesn't mean that all exploits against Microsoft's runtime magically start to work on these platforms - barring, of course, exploits that exploit design flaws in the platform rather than bugs.
Microsoft may have bugs in their platform that lets it execute arbitrary code - well, that bug likely may not be in Mono runtime. Or, the other way around!
Hilarious. So this guy sent them a complete, well-formatted XHTML document, and they pasted it into a tag in the middle of a regular Slashdot page.
Also, when I saved the page in browser as a HTML file, then opened it in XEmacs to remove the Slashdot HTML to view it as the author wanted, I noted the original file had DOS line delimiters (\r\n), while Slashdot HTML (obviously) had UNIX line delimiters (\n).
A very interesting cut and paste job, yes, I agree completely =)
An extremely slow news day if a) Exult 1.0 wasn't noted in Slashdot some time ago, and b) U7Run has been, like Exult, around quite a while. This isn't exactly even news =)
And everyone interested playing U7 should definitely get Exult, because it fixes some annoyances in original U7BG and, in general, feels slightly better and is technically far superior. And it's also easier to configure, I guess! =)
or creating a real DOS bootdisk with real mode drivers would make playing an antique game easy on a modern OS.
It's just that U7 is the only really painful program I've had to deal with. It never ran right without hours and hours of tuning! Getting a satisfactory amount of low memory, getting the perfect combination of EMS and XMS::shudder at the abbreviations::, and trying to fit the damn mouse driver to that soup. And then the real fun begins: Configuring the sound support perfectly...
<old-dos-user>And nowadays, people complain that Microsoft sucks when they need to reboot a couple of times when installing Windows. But back when I was a newbie... (blah blah) booted 20 times to get EMM386 and HIMEM right (blah blah) uphill both ways in snow. And this is Finland we're talking about. Lots of snow. Lots.</old-dos-user>
Also, there's the issue of incomplete DOS support for current hardware. (I could, for some weird reason, get my USB rat and keyboard to work in some DOS games when running Windows98SE... lucky they weren't too memory-exhaustive.)
The installation of Exult couldn't be easier: apt-get install exult, some messing with the conf files, and tadah! And it even runs perfectly, properly frame-limited (U7BG was just a little bit too fast in P166, and I haven't dared to test it without mo'slo on my P3-600...) and MIDI comes through software synthesis and there's proper sound effects and tons of new cool features.
Actually, while I'm here, regarding the "Your Internet Connection is Not Optimized" message, does their software include features to disable seeing this popup once it's installed?
The "optimizer" program is reportedly just an expensive program that messes with the Windows PPP properties (completely according to any FAQ file that people with a half a clue could find with 30 seconds of googling). It'd be far-fetched to expect it to do that. Then again, I don't really know if it's smart enough to do that. =)
Sourceforge?...
Why do these sites need to be blocked?
Sourceforge probably hosts software that could be used to bypass such filters. But most importantly, they host the development of Freenet, a thorn in web censor's side =)
I was thinking about making a fps called Godmode/PK.... I'd even open-source the code and let everyone behind the Magic Curtain to write whatever hacks and bots they wanted.
I remember playing Team Fortress some time after the source release and for some reason one thing in the game seemed to have a ridiculous amount of frags. Must have been a lousy day to play =)
My online game of choice? Classic Mac's Tank Bolo. I wonder if anyone has made any cheat proggies for that, yet.
Hrmm, wonder if anyone's been lifeless enough to write cheats for bzflag... =)
50 euros. What the hell kind of question was that? =)
Of course, CPU and storage space would limit what can be done somewhat,
Storage space might be a small problem (probably not a gigantic headache, since the graphics need to be reduced in size somewhat anyway =)... And you can always cut some non-essential stuff (even less animation frames etc...) Doable, I say, but not entirely painless.
and getting the networking to work with an IR port would be painful...
Except that GBA doesn't have an IR port (since almost no games used the IR port on GBC either =), but it does have cabling. Might be interesting to see a 4-player Melee...
*sigh* Golgotha, Crack Dot Com's last game. A long-waited game, and something I decided I would be buying a 3D card for... and eventually picked up a cheap Voodoo 1 and the demo just *rocked* with it. =) The good news in its case was that the source code and data was released later...
A cross between a RTS and FPS. Too bad it didn't fly; I heard that even the Battlezone remake (similar game from same period of time) didn't sell too well, even when I loved it =)
In.19, I had severe problems with mouse and keyboard - simply put, they just didn't work, kept spewing timeouts. =/ There appears to be an UHCI "timeout fixes" an something about cancelling HID device changes that didn't work, maybe I should try this...
Better watch it - Metallica's got a song called "Call of C'thulu". Phoenix Technologies' they can handle, but Lars's wrath..?:-o
Actually, the Metallica song was "Call of Ktulu", (okay, same thing, anyway) and secondly, the Cthulhu mythos was one of the most "open" of the fictional mythoses and definitely not a H.P. Lovecraft's private private playground. If Metallica can make an instrumental piece on Cthulhu mythos, surely Mozilla folks can call their lite browser Cthulhu. (I just think it'd be too big name for a small browser. =)
New release? New roadmap? How soon before the clown at MozillaQuest releases an article like "Mozilla 1.2 is the buggiest release of the Browser-Suite ever, and the release of 1.0 is delayed even further?" Please don't mention Bugzilla or the article will get something about sweeping the bugs under the carpet or something =)
Re:I like this movie and all, but where are the
on
Massive Two Towers Battle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is important to understand that Tolkien was raised in a different culture, before racial equality (as opposed to simple racial tolerance) began to be accepted and widespread.
yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. It's better for everyone not to participate in any kind of "Tolkien was a racist" discussion, because most likely nothing fruitful will ever come from it. =)
In the Silmarillion, the world is bent from flat to spherical so that no mortal may ever sail the way to the divine lands again. So I'm not sure whether Valinor is America, or whether America is the easternmost land, furthest from the light and wisdom of the West.
I don't remember enough of Tolkien maps, and may be not knowing anything, so thwack me, but wasn't there a land mass east of that of Middle-Earth? Not well described, and that would have been the Americas. I was always thinking of Valinor as a third big land mass with no modern counterpart whatsoever.
I also know that many visually impaired people use Emacs Speak (which supports Aural Style Sheets for web browsing)
Some sort of a sideline: Any idea if any software speech synths support aural CSS (emacspeak appears to be more suited for hardware devices)? All of the Linux TTS software seems to link to IBM ViaVoice which seems to be gone. I really love Festival (especially with OGI patch - the "mwm" is much clearer than Festival default sounds!) but Festival doesn't support aural CSS, just some markup called SABLE.
(I'm not blind, but reading looooong texts from display might make me one, and being an ecologically conscious wolf I elected not to print everything! =)
Tried the gateway thing with Mozilla 1.1 and Optimoz piemenus.
Right click: got a message dialogy saying it was "protected", but the pie menu remained, and followed the mouse around.
Ctrl+Right click: got the normal image context menu right away, no messages.
Doesn't work any better than the other anti-image-save scripts...
I also tried their "HTML source code hiding" things. Well, duh, couldn't see the source, but for some obscure reason the browser understood the code and rendered the page just fine, which sort of defeats the purpose with. Interesting. Should I just copy-paste the page content and use the page info to copy media? Or just save complete web page? (Ended up doing the latter. Apparently the secret key is jd443fD. Wonder what that does?)
I got a Palm m100, cripes, 2 years ago. It has been in constant use ever since - as a calendar (God how nice this is compared to paper calendars!), with Keyring it's extremely extremely useful for storing all of these millions of passwords! And, of course, plucker and avantgo are good for web stuff and electronic books. On lectures and in train and stuff, I take notes and write stuff with the memo pad. Most recently, I've been simply writing down my payments in memopad so I can enter them to gnucash on my home computer.
All in all, extremely useful little thing. I'll never go back to paper calendars!
And given that the NVIDIA driver is some 7 megabytes of code, including the kernel driver, GLX and XAA modules, and libGL and libGLcore libraries, it would be impossible.
Well, it's their problem if they do the damn OpenGL implementation in software. More distrust, I say. Didn't SGI do the whole OpenGL rendering pipeline on silicon once? =)
O tempora, o mores: Stuff that should be done on hardware is done on software... wasteful, wasteful...
(Yeah, I know, upgradeability tends to be a little bit better on software drivers. But still... =)
Is there an open-source or free-software product in the Mathematica / Matlab / Maple etc. space?
Fear not! Computers were made to crunch numbers - there's always a good chance someone's doing just that =)
I'm not a mathematician... but I've tried a few math apps here and there. Octave + Gnuplot (people aready mentioned this), and Euler (I particularly like this thing's "workbook" approach... Save all notes in your session to a file, load it back, and fully edit everything in your command history! Way cool.
Haha..Oh my gawd. Yeah, the animation is quite impressive...but jeezus...download this for the botched English subtitles....
But note that the subtitles have probably more in common with the story than the actual soundtrack... I don't know Swedish too well, but I can tell it wasn't exactly accurate =)
Slashdot Mirror
Others already mentioned Festival - and I wholeheartedly recommend it. (Under BSDish license.)
I especially recommend it with the OGI CSLU patch, even when it's not really open source (only for non-commercial use). Festival is great, it sounds nice even with the normal voice set... but this patch makes it sound really great.
I've used this program to read me some looong texts. (I don't want to do unnecessary large printouts, want to spare the batteries of my PDA, and I don't want to wreck my eyes completely with the monitor...) Strangely, the first text I fed through the OGIFestival was some H.P. Lovecraft story that featured artificial voice... =)
I wish they'd make the changes available under the same license as Festival so I could just apt-get the thing, now I need to do some patch tricks to get it up and running =/ But it's still fairly easy to build by following the instructions.
In music downloads, everyone wants MP3. In video downloads, everyone wants MPEG or DivX. In net radio, Real is alive (unfortunately), but Shoutcast and its derivatives, based on MP3 or Ogg, are rising, of course. In streaming video, Real is still doing well. (And are there actually working streaming cross-platform video? And by cross-platform I mean "Has a native Linux client", too - so Quicktime doesn't count =)
Who cares about spyware? What about general user experience? =)
My own experience is that RealPlayer in Linux is far from good. But with Helix DNA Player out there, why isn't anyone bolting that to Xine?
This way, I'd go on any web site that's offering Realvideo content, say open it, Xine would open it - and
I'd so much like to watch RealVideo with the same video player that I use for everything else...
...or someone to give a gigantic donation to xenutv.com so that they get fat net connection and ability to publish their stuff as MPEG =)
The strength of the .NET is directly proportional to the strength of the implementation of the .NET. Just because .NET comes on UNIX doesn't mean that all exploits against Microsoft's runtime magically start to work on these platforms - barring, of course, exploits that exploit design flaws in the platform rather than bugs.
Microsoft may have bugs in their platform that lets it execute arbitrary code - well, that bug likely may not be in Mono runtime. Or, the other way around!
Also, when I saved the page in browser as a HTML file, then opened it in XEmacs to remove the Slashdot HTML to view it as the author wanted, I noted the original file had DOS line delimiters (\r\n), while Slashdot HTML (obviously) had UNIX line delimiters (\n).
A very interesting cut and paste job, yes, I agree completely =)
An extremely slow news day if a) Exult 1.0 wasn't noted in Slashdot some time ago, and b) U7Run has been, like Exult, around quite a while. This isn't exactly even news =)
And everyone interested playing U7 should definitely get Exult, because it fixes some annoyances in original U7BG and, in general, feels slightly better and is technically far superior. And it's also easier to configure, I guess! =)
Yeah, that's bad. Makes singing along kind of hard. (And mind you, I always sing along. =)
Overplayed? ::chokes on the coffee:: What? Overplayed? Never!
Overplayed or not, it is and it will be my all-time favorite piece of game music.
It's just that U7 is the only really painful program I've had to deal with. It never ran right without hours and hours of tuning! Getting a satisfactory amount of low memory, getting the perfect combination of EMS and XMS ::shudder at the abbreviations::, and trying to fit the damn mouse driver to that soup. And then the real fun begins: Configuring the sound support perfectly...
<old-dos-user>And nowadays, people complain that Microsoft sucks when they need to reboot a couple of times when installing Windows. But back when I was a newbie... (blah blah) booted 20 times to get EMM386 and HIMEM right (blah blah) uphill both ways in snow. And this is Finland we're talking about. Lots of snow. Lots.</old-dos-user>
Also, there's the issue of incomplete DOS support for current hardware. (I could, for some weird reason, get my USB rat and keyboard to work in some DOS games when running Windows98SE... lucky they weren't too memory-exhaustive.)
The installation of Exult couldn't be easier: apt-get install exult, some messing with the conf files, and tadah! And it even runs perfectly, properly frame-limited (U7BG was just a little bit too fast in P166, and I haven't dared to test it without mo'slo on my P3-600...) and MIDI comes through software synthesis and there's proper sound effects and tons of new cool features.
The "optimizer" program is reportedly just an expensive program that messes with the Windows PPP properties (completely according to any FAQ file that people with a half a clue could find with 30 seconds of googling). It'd be far-fetched to expect it to do that. Then again, I don't really know if it's smart enough to do that. =)
Sourceforge probably hosts software that could be used to bypass such filters. But most importantly, they host the development of Freenet, a thorn in web censor's side =)
Nah, that'd be LeGorso and LeGorSIKA (also trailer)... The other movies just don't have equally wacky subtitles and equally complicated plot. =)
Oh, you mean this little open-source FPS that, if I'm not completely mistaken, got a "few" more cheats after it was open-sourced? =)
I remember playing Team Fortress some time after the source release and for some reason one thing in the game seemed to have a ridiculous amount of frags. Must have been a lousy day to play =)
Hrmm, wonder if anyone's been lifeless enough to write cheats for bzflag... =)
50 euros. What the hell kind of question was that? =)
Storage space might be a small problem (probably not a gigantic headache, since the graphics need to be reduced in size somewhat anyway =) ... And you can always cut some non-essential stuff (even less animation frames etc...) Doable, I say, but not entirely painless.
Except that GBA doesn't have an IR port (since almost no games used the IR port on GBC either =), but it does have cabling. Might be interesting to see a 4-player Melee...
*sigh* Golgotha, Crack Dot Com's last game. A long-waited game, and something I decided I would be buying a 3D card for... and eventually picked up a cheap Voodoo 1 and the demo just *rocked* with it. =) The good news in its case was that the source code and data was released later...
A cross between a RTS and FPS. Too bad it didn't fly; I heard that even the Battlezone remake (similar game from same period of time) didn't sell too well, even when I loved it =)
In .19, I had severe problems with mouse and keyboard - simply put, they just didn't work, kept spewing timeouts. =/ There appears to be an UHCI "timeout fixes" an something about cancelling HID device changes that didn't work, maybe I should try this...
Actually, the Metallica song was "Call of Ktulu", (okay, same thing, anyway) and secondly, the Cthulhu mythos was one of the most "open" of the fictional mythoses and definitely not a H.P. Lovecraft's private private playground. If Metallica can make an instrumental piece on Cthulhu mythos, surely Mozilla folks can call their lite browser Cthulhu. (I just think it'd be too big name for a small browser. =)
New release? New roadmap? How soon before the clown at MozillaQuest releases an article like "Mozilla 1.2 is the buggiest release of the Browser-Suite ever, and the release of 1.0 is delayed even further?" Please don't mention Bugzilla or the article will get something about sweeping the bugs under the carpet or something =)
yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. It's better for everyone not to participate in any kind of "Tolkien was a racist" discussion, because most likely nothing fruitful will ever come from it. =)
I don't remember enough of Tolkien maps, and may be not knowing anything, so thwack me, but wasn't there a land mass east of that of Middle-Earth? Not well described, and that would have been the Americas. I was always thinking of Valinor as a third big land mass with no modern counterpart whatsoever.
this was the best map I could find?
Some sort of a sideline: Any idea if any software speech synths support aural CSS (emacspeak appears to be more suited for hardware devices)? All of the Linux TTS software seems to link to IBM ViaVoice which seems to be gone. I really love Festival (especially with OGI patch - the "mwm" is much clearer than Festival default sounds!) but Festival doesn't support aural CSS, just some markup called SABLE.
(I'm not blind, but reading looooong texts from display might make me one, and being an ecologically conscious wolf I elected not to print everything! =)
Tried the gateway thing with Mozilla 1.1 and Optimoz piemenus.
Right click: got a message dialogy saying it was "protected", but the pie menu remained, and followed the mouse around.
Ctrl+Right click: got the normal image context menu right away, no messages.
Doesn't work any better than the other anti-image-save scripts...
I also tried their "HTML source code hiding" things. Well, duh, couldn't see the source, but for some obscure reason the browser understood the code and rendered the page just fine, which sort of defeats the purpose with. Interesting. Should I just copy-paste the page content and use the page info to copy media? Or just save complete web page? (Ended up doing the latter. Apparently the secret key is jd443fD. Wonder what that does?)
I got a Palm m100, cripes, 2 years ago. It has been in constant use ever since - as a calendar (God how nice this is compared to paper calendars!), with Keyring it's extremely extremely useful for storing all of these millions of passwords! And, of course, plucker and avantgo are good for web stuff and electronic books. On lectures and in train and stuff, I take notes and write stuff with the memo pad. Most recently, I've been simply writing down my payments in memopad so I can enter them to gnucash on my home computer.
All in all, extremely useful little thing. I'll never go back to paper calendars!
Well, it's their problem if they do the damn OpenGL implementation in software. More distrust, I say. Didn't SGI do the whole OpenGL rendering pipeline on silicon once? =)
O tempora, o mores: Stuff that should be done on hardware is done on software... wasteful, wasteful...
(Yeah, I know, upgradeability tends to be a little bit better on software drivers. But still... =)
Fear not! Computers were made to crunch numbers - there's always a good chance someone's doing just that =)
I'm not a mathematician... but I've tried a few math apps here and there. Octave + Gnuplot (people aready mentioned this), and Euler (I particularly like this thing's "workbook" approach... Save all notes in your session to a file, load it back, and fully edit everything in your command history! Way cool.
But note that the subtitles have probably more in common with the story than the actual soundtrack... I don't know Swedish too well, but I can tell it wasn't exactly accurate =)