[needs-packaging] mbrola-voices

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This bug is tagged needs-packaging which identifies it as a request for a new package in Ubuntu. As a part of the managing needs-packaging bug reports specification, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Specs/NeedsPackagingBugs, all needs-packaging bug reports have Wishlist importance. Subsequently, I'm setting this bug's status to Wishlist.

suggest also the following package festival-mbrola see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/165245

Meanwhile, the following voices have been packaged and are available:

mbrola-af1 - Afrikaans male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-br3 - Brazilian Portuguese male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-cr1 - Croatian male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-cz2 - Czech male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-de6 - German male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-de7 - German female voice for Mbrola
mbrola-en1 - British English male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-es1 - Spanish male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-fr4 - French female voice for Mbrola
mbrola-gr2 - Greek male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-hu1 - Hungarian male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-id1 - Indonesian male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-it3 - Italian male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-it4 - Italian female voice for Mbrola
mbrola-la1 - Latin male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-nl2 - Dutch male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-pl1 - Polish female voice for Mbrola
mbrola-pt1 - European Portuguese female voice for Mbrola
mbrola-ro1 - Romanian male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-sw1 - Swedish male voice for Mbrola
mbrola-sw2 - Swedish female voice for Mbrola
mbrola-us1 - American English female voice for Mbrola
mbrola-us2 - American English male voice for Mbrola

Please note that at least the following also need to be packaged:
mbrola-nl1
mbrola-nl3
mbrola-us3

Mmm, what do you mean by "in the meanwhile"?

About nl1, nl3, it is not really useful, since we do not currently have tools to produce the phoneme files for them (espeak supports only nl2)

About us3, it's already packaged in Debian, Ubuntu just needs to inherit it.

I'm not sure to understand what you mean by a "mbrola-voices package", and in particular, "mbrola package has already a suggestion for this package on Karmic, even though this package still needs to be created.": mbrola suggests mbrola-voice (provided by all mbrola voice packages), not mbrola-voices. Would mrbola-voices just be a meta-package which depends on all the voices available in Ubuntu? Since that would result in installing several hundreds of Megabytes, I'm not sure it would really be useful to have.

Via those MBROLA-festival files I could use nl1 and nl3 (I think if I remember correctly). What would be the best way to get these supported too? File a request at espeak?

The files I have are about 19 MB, see

voices$ tree mbrola
mbrola/
├── en1
│   └── en1 -> /usr/share/mbrola/voices/en1
├── nl1
│   ├── license.txt
│   ├── nl1
│   ├── nl1.txt
│   └── TEST
│   ├── 1-10.pho
│   ├── 11-20.pho
│   ├── 21-30.pho
│   ├── 888.pho
│   ├── dialog.pho
│   ├── mbroli.ini
│   ├── phone.pho
│   └── singing.pho
├── nl2
│   └── nl2 -> /usr/share/mbrola/voices/nl2
├── nl3
│   ├── license.txt
│   ├── nl3
│   ├── nl3.txt
│   └── TEST
│   ├── hagel.pho
│   ├── hoort.pho
│   ├── kat.pho
│   ├── mbroli.ini
│   ├── spengi.pho
│   └── weltrusten.pho
├── us1
│   └── us1 -> /usr/share/mbrola/voices/us1
├── us2
│   └── us2 -> /usr/share/mbrola/voices/us2
└── us3
    ├── license.txt
    ├── TEST
    │   ├── cslu.pho
    │   ├── diphone.pho
    │   ├── mbroli.ini
    │   └── mike.pho
    ├── us3
    └── us3.txt

10 directories, 31 files

voices$ tree festival/
festival/
└── english
    ├── en1_mbrola
    │   ├── en1 -> /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/en1/
    │   ├── en1mrpa
    │   └── festvox
    │   └── en1_mbrola.scm
    ├── us1_mbrola
    │   ├── festvox
    │   │   ├── us1_mbrola.scm
    │   │   └── usdurtreeZ.scm
    │   ├── us1 -> /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/us1
    │   └── usradio
    ├── us2_mbrola
    │   ├── festvox
    │   │   ├── us2_mbrola.scm
    │   │   └── usdurtreeZ.scm
    │   ├── us2 -> /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/us2
    │   └── usradio
    └── us3_mbrola
        ├── festvox
        │   ├── us3_mbrola.scm
        │   └── usdurtreeZ.scm
        ├── us3 -> /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/us3
        └── usradio

Anyways, see my last comment at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/165245 If I can help by requesting somewhere that support for nl1 and nl3 will be madeavailable, I'm happy to do that. For the rest, I will wait for Ubuntu to get in sync with Debian. Thanks

Mmm, I don't see how you could use nl1 and nl3. Could you explain how
you proceed?

mbrola /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/nl1/nl1 /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/nl1/TEST/dialog.pho -.au|play -
mbrola /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/nl2/nl2 /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/nl2/TEST/dialog.pho -.au|play -
mbrola /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/nl3/nl3 /usr/local/share/mbrola-voices/nl3/TEST/kat.pho -.au|play -

Yes, mbrola alone will permit to read some existing phoneme files, but
as I said, we still lack a tool to *produce* nl1/2/3 phoneme files. Put
another way: how to start from a Dutch text and get mbrola to speak it?
I don't know any free tool to produce nl1/2/3 phoneme files that mbrola
would then be able to speak.

Correct but the files are, how limited it might be, still usable. Packaging nl1/nl2/nl3 will broaden the aviable languages and advocate the existence of these files.

I still don't think it will fly:

- either the user is not knowledged about mbrola voices, and he will
just install mbrola-nl* and wonder for a long time why they do not
show up in high-level speech interfaces.

- or he is knowledged about mbrola voices, he will have to be anyway,
to use these voices, since no tool exists to use them, and he is
actually already able to fetch voices from the mbrola website.

In short: shipping mbrola-nl* will not help people who wouldn't know
about to fetch them from the mbrola website anyway. So it won't help
anybody. If we were to upload mbrola-nl*, we should as well upload
*all* mbrola voices, which is very big, and only to bring frustration
to users which will wonder why these voices don't actually work.

Mbrola can use them. Meanwhile https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mbrola-nl2 is shipped. Please also ship nl1 and nl3.

Testing can be done directly with mbrola /usr/share/mbrola/nl2/nl2 /usr/share/doc/mbrola-nl2/examples/*.pho -.au|play -

Again, there is no point in shipping nl1 and nl3 as long as we don't have any tool to produce .pho files for them. We only have that for the nl2 language (thanks to espeak), that's why I uploaded that one. Uploading nl1 and nl3 would be like promise the user that he can use them, but the truth is that he won't be able to use them since he'll have no tool to produce the .pho files required by nl1 and nl3.