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16 <head><title>Setting up MBROLA for FreeTTS</title></head>
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22 <h1>Setting up MBROLA for FreeTTS</h1>
28 <p>The aim of the MBROLA project, initiated by the TCTS Lab of
29 the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium), is to obtain a
30 set of speech synthesizers for as many languages as possible,
31 and provide them free for non-commercial applications. The
32 MBROLA source code is held tightly by its owners, but
33 fortunately they provide standalone binaries for a large
34 number of platforms. In addition, a large number of diphone
35 voice databases exist for many languages.</p>
37 <p><b><font color="ff0000">NOTE:</font> FreeTTS support for
38 MBROLA on the Windows platform has been troublesome in the
39 past, but appears to have been fixed by the MBROLA team.
42 href="http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1219083&forum_id=137669">FreeTTS Forum</a>
43 for more information.</b></p>
45 <p>Three US English voices exist, named us1 (female), us2
46 (male) and us3 (male). Thanks to the work of Marc Schroder,
47 text-to-speech Researcher in the Language Technology Lab at
48 DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany, FreeTTS can use these voices.</p>
50 <h3>Download and Install MBROLA Binaries</h3>
51 <p>The MBROLA binaries and voice databases can be downloaded free
52 for non-commercial, non-military use at:</p>
55 <p><a href="http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html">
56 http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html</a></p>
59 <p>Decide on a base directory to put both MBROLA binary
60 and MBROLA voice databases. Let's assume this is
61 /home/jim/mbrola. Download and install the MBROLA binaries
62 for your platform into this directory. Also download and
63 install the us1, us2, and us3 binaries into this directory.
64 When you are done, you should have a directory that looks
65 something like the following (sample taken from Mac OS X):</p>
68 bash-2.05a$ ls -l /home/jim/mbrola
70 -rwxrwxrwx 1 jim staff 31686 Mar 6 2001 License.txt
71 drwxrwxrwx 3 jim staff 102 Mar 5 2001 MbroliX.app
72 -rwxrwxrwx 1 jim staff 1318 Mar 5 2001 ReadMe.rtf
73 -rwxrwxrwx 1 jim staff 1044 Mar 5 2001 ReadMe.txt
74 drwxr-xr-x 9 jim staff 306 Aug 28 17:04 distrib
75 -rw-r--r-- 1 jim staff 0 Aug 28 17:50 foo.raw
76 lrwxr-xr-x 1 jim staff 17 Aug 28 17:50 mbrola -> mbrola-darwin-ppc
77 -rwxr-xr-x 1 jim staff 47616 May 6 2002 mbrola-darwin-ppc
78 drwxr-xr-x 8 jim staff 272 Aug 19 16:11 us1
79 drwxr-xr-x 7 jim staff 238 Aug 19 16:11 us2
80 drwxr-xr-x 7 jim staff 238 Aug 19 16:11 us3
83 <p>Note that FreeTTS expects the MBROLA binary to be named "mbrola."
84 As a result, you may need to rename the mbrola binary or create a
85 symbolic link to it. For example, on Mac OS X, the mbrola binary
86 is named "mbrola-darwin-ppc." Creating a symbolic link named "mbrola"
87 that points to "mbrola-darwin-ppc" (as shown above) will allow FreeTTS
88 to find the mbrola binary.
90 <p>Also make sure that both the link "mbrola" and the mbrola binary
91 are executable. Using this example:
94 <p><code>chmod a+x mbrola mbrola-darwin-ppc</code>
97 <h3>Enable FreeTTS Support for MBROLA</h3>
98 <p>To enable FreeTTS support for MBROLA, merely copy
99 mbrola/mbrola.jar to lib/mbrola.jar. Then, whenever you run
100 any FreeTTS application, specify the "mbrola.base" directory
101 as a system property:</p>
103 <p><code>java -Dmbrola.base=/home/jim/mbrola -jar
104 bin/FreeTTSHelloWorld.jar mbrola_us1</code></p>
107 <h3>Determining Available MBROLA Voices</h3>
108 <p>To get the names of the available MBROLA voices, run the
112 java -Dmbrola.base=/home/jim/mbrola -jar lib/mbrola.jar
113 VoiceDirectory 'de.dfki.lt.freetts.en.us.MbrolaVoiceDirectory'
116 Description: MBROLA Voice us1
131 Description: MBROLA Voice us2
146 Description: MBROLA Voice us3
163 <p>See the <a href="../license.terms">license terms</a>
164 and <a href="../acknowledgments.txt">acknowledgments</a>.
166 Copyright 2001,2003 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights
167 Reserved. Use is subject to license terms.</p>