Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[steve_s]

This is a relatively advanced howto, assuming you know how to use wine and are familiar with the command line to some extent. If something mystifies you, please comment about it. If you've got some insights for us, please comment about it.

I had enjoyed using Balabolka (text to speech software) but didn't find a comparable one in Linux, so decided to give it shot in Wine.

Right now I'm running Saluki with wine installed. Not gonna tell you how to do that; there are a few posts out there about getting wine installed.

I will however mention that, because of how Puppy is structured with a save file and a separate home on the hard drive, I just about always get wine set up, then run winecfg to create the folders that are needed.

Then I move .wine from the /root directory to the home folder/drive and then produce a symlink in /root that directs to .wine. This puts all the size of .wine on the hard drive rather than in the Puppy save file, saving on space.

I had been running Balabolka portable (can be found here among other places) in windows from a flash drive. The version I'm running in Linux now I just dragged and dropped/copied it from the flash drive to the C: drive, Program Files area of wine.

Balabolka runs great like this. Either cd to that directory in wine and run wine balabolka.exe or write a little script to run it then put it on the desktop as a launcher (again, I'm using Saluki so XFCE is a little different than JWM, but the script idea can work with either).

The issue wasn't getting Balabolka to run. The issue is that Balabolka uses the native voices on whatever system you are running. Saluki: no voices for Balabolka. So how to get the Windows voices in wine?

Follow the instructions from here: http://ubuntu-answers.blogspot.com/2010/12/text-to-speach-sapi-on-linux-ubuntu.html#!/2010/12/text-to-speach-sapi-on-linux-ubuntu.html including the proposed work around. Of course, its in Ubuntu and we've already got wine installed, so there is some stuff you can skip at the beginning.

That seems to take care of getting the voices there for Sapi5. But for more voices I went to Open-sapi from here.

I downloaded uk_eng, us_eng and sapi4 exe files to /root/.wine/drive_c/Program Files. Then I cd'd to that directory and installed them using wine and the exe file, hitting yes on each of them.

However, in Saluki, wine yelled at me, saying I didn't have libmpg123.so.0 so I downloaded and installed it from here. Then, although wine still yelled at me, they seemed to install fine.

After sapi4 installed and those voices added, I now have Balabolka running with a whole list of choices for voices in Sapi4 and 3 voices in Sapi5. I'm open to suggestions on getting more voices and/or recomended voices.

Attached should be a screenshot and an mp3 example file if I got it to upload. Enjoy and post back comments, recomendations and questions.

[steve_s]

Here's a screenshot of Balabolka on Saluki...

[steve_s]

And the mp3 that was exported from that screenshot...

Had to zip it to upload it...

[FBnil]

Prepend

\Vol=32768\

(including the backslashes) to the text you want to convert to audio.
Balabolka seems to reset the volume to 0 if you use SAPI4 voices when saving audio files.

More information about SAPI4 control tags: http://products.timehouse.fi/sapidoc.asp?con=8

[steve_s]