10.5 Using Sable

Support in Festival for Sable is as a text mode. In the command mode use the following to process an Sable file

(tts "file.sable" 'sable)

Also the automatic selection of mode based on file type has been set up such that files ending .sable will be automatically synthesized in this mode. Thus

festival --tts fred.sable

Will render fred.sable as speech in Sable mode.

Another way of using Sable is through the Emacs interface. The say-buffer command will send the Emacs buffer mode to Festival as its tts-mode. If the Emacs mode is stml or sgml the file is treated as an sable file. See Emacs interface.

Many people experimenting with Sable (and TTS in general) often want all the waveform output to be saved to be played at a later date. The simplest way to do this is using the text2wave script, It respects the audo mode selection so

text2wave fred.sable -o fred.wav

Note this renders the file a single waveform (done by concatenating the waveforms for each utterance in the Sable file).

If you wish the waveform for each utterance in a file saved you can cause the tts process to save the waveforms during synthesis. A call to

festival> (save_waves_during_tts)

Any future call to tts will cause the waveforms to be saved in a file tts_file_xxx.wav where xxx is a number. A call to (save_waves_during_tts_STOP) will stop saving the waves. A message is printed when the waveform is saved otherwise people forget about this and wonder why their disk has filled up.

This is done by inserting a function in tts_hooks which saves the wave. To do other things to each utterances during TTS (such as saving the utterance structure), try redefining the function save_tts_output (see festival/lib/tts.scm).