Festival and SD cards

[mikorians]

How much wear and tear is festival tts speech synthesis going to put on my SD card?

[mikorians]

(Bump)
A lot of non-noob questions in this forum...

[RaTTuS]

no idea
what does it do
where is it from
what does it look like

[mikorians]

Um, yeah, the Festival text to speech synthesis standalone application?
Yeah. 1 google.

Why did you bother posting a blank answer - that's the 2nd time he's done this to me BTW.

REQUEST post be moved to intermediate or advanced forum.

PS:
Should I be asking the university? I have no 'in' with them.

[Navyscourge]

How much wear and tear is festival tts speech synthesis going to put on my SD card?

From Google:

* Festival is only available in source code form. There seems to be instructions in the manual, but neither Raspbian or Debian are listed as a tested OS for building it.

* There does not seem to be any immediate support; only an email address

* A quote " It designed as a component of large speech technology systems. " - what 'large speech technology system' are you going to use it in?

Then again, this page ( "http://elinux.org/RPi_Text_to_Speech_(Speech_Synthesis)" ) suggests it is available from the repository. Is that what you are using?

Your initial question did not supply much information, and answers to my questions will affect any answer we might give you. If you are worried about the "wear and tear" you could try running it with a USB stick suitably configured. I have not seen anyone else mention Festival, so I doubt that you will find someone who knows anything about it if they have not answered yet.

We do try to help people, but far too often we need a bit more information. It is common for the first response to be a list of questions that we believe need answers to so we can at least make a good guess about what a poster wants

[paulie]

Festival can be compiled in Raspbian.
I have done so to provide tts for xastir (APRS ham radio software).

[mikorians]

It is odd to me that you're unable to find information about festival.
I didn't compile it (I don't have the skill, nor know C).
I just downloaded the raspian package from github based on a page about the raspberry pi and speech synthesis.
(That wasn't easy either)
I needed a standalone package. It was the only one. Everything else required Internet access.
This is for a mobile project without connectivity.
I ask about the wear and tear because it will be constantly speaking, and there is a substantial delay whilst it 'constructs' the waveform for speech. I wondered only if it was disk activity or in memory activity. I suspect the latter because the docs said something about OPTIONALLY creating wave files for aplay.
I got the GitHub link from here, I think:
http://elinux.org/RPi_Text_to_Speech_(S ... _to_Speech
Hope my info helps.

[RaTTuS]

you see if you put more info into what it is you're asking it saves a lot of time going back and forth before we get to the nub of the problem [see sig]
if you are worried about wear and tear on the sdcard then you're doing it wrong .

sdcards [as usb sticks] will die but they need to be written to a lot [a lot!] YMMV
if you are making temp files for outputting via [whatever] then write them to a RAM disk then output that.

having no internet access when it is running does not preclude having internet access when you are making / building / installing

learn how to backup

I've not looked at the code , and I'm not really interested in it but having got the source then
look at the README file or INSTALL that may help

see also
./configure
make


....if you ask intelligent questions then you will get more intelligent answers and it saves us a lot of back and forth - it will also help others if they then search on the same terms [in and ideal world]
YMMV
etc.

[gkreidl]

1) festival is available from the Raspbian repository (version 1.2.1-release8 in Jessie).

2) It's hard to tell how much disk usage is involved while running it without really studying the source code or running some tests.

3) Full blown Linux/GNU systems (like a standard Raspbian) write a lot to the file system and also do many applications. The number of write accesses to SD cards is limited and so they are not really the best choice for a long time stable system. There also seem to be big differences between different kinds of SD cards and manufacturers. My first Pi SD card started to become unreliable after 6 months. Meanwhile I'm running all my Pis from HDD.

4) Small "embedded" Linux distributions can run completely inside the RAM and may offer a workaround for such problems. But I have no idea if the solution of the OP will work within such a system. Providing spare cards for your application might be a simple alternative.

@Rattus: If you don't know anything about it and are really not interested in it, you shouldn't answer.

[mikorians]

Ok.
Well, see, the RPI came with the TF (SD was the older RPI - have one), and I had assumed that in command-line mode or single-window (startx app) mode that there would be less wear. DOS (gasp) didn't.
My program is in python(2).
If nobody can find out whether or not F assembles it's phrases in RAM or not, I do have backups of the card, so don't worry about it. It just would've been nice to know. I wondered if it simply opened a file or not. I can't read that source.