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Comment by TylerLives | Hacker News Reader

I followed the instructions and I'm getting:

  Warning: HTS_fopen: Cannot open hts/htsvoice.
  aplay: main:666: bad speed value 0
  aplay: main:666: bad speed value 0
  nil

I'm using Pop OS 20.04(based on the same version of Ubuntu) and Festival 2.5.0

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Perhaps these lines from Debian 11's /etc/festival.scm are not added to your install and may help?

    ;; Debian-specific: Use aplay to play audio
    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")
    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)

In any case, I do not see this error on Debian.

I did however go through the motion of installing the nitech voices before reading that they only work with older versions of festival. Doh!

Yep. This one of of the primary reasons I keep a 2010-era Ubuntu 10.04 box around: a working platform for festival 1.9x and high quality TTS voices. Modern distros packing 2.x are a big step backwards. I've tried to get things working as well as they did in Ubuntu 10.04 on Ubuntu 14.04 and it's not really possible; even worse on Debian 10/11.

Those lines were already in the config file. I'll try compiling Festival from source when I get home. Some people say that worked for them.

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