MBROLA INFORMATION SHEET Sep 18th 1998 (fwd)

[Hans Zoebelein <zocki@goldfish.cube.net>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 16:52:39 +0200
From: Vincent Pagel <pagel@hal.fpms.ac.be>
To: mbrola-news@tcts.fpms.ac.be
Subject: MBROLA INFORMATION SHEET Sep 18th 1998
Resent-Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 16:53:11 +0200
Resent-From: mbrola-news@tcts.fpms.ac.be

Mons 18/09/98

[ASCII art omitted. hans]

.... Mozilla is back ....

Dear Mbrola users, an avalanche of news:

1) To help you surf with our databases we have included an inception date in 
their names. It's particularly usefull because our miror sites or CDROMs are 
not
allways synchronized with the Belgian primary site.

2) GR1 a Greek male voice provided by Aggelos Bletsas and Dr George Sergiadis
from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

3) a rebuild of FR2 a French female voice at 22050Khz, enhance the quality

4) US2 an American English Male voice provided by Babel Technologies. This 
voice introduce a new allophone /Or/ (an /O/ in /r/ context like in "sort").

5) The release of Mbrola 3.01d, the code has undergone a complete
   relifting, and it has visible effects for end-users.

   New features: 

	* Windows DLL -> the annoying License message bothers you as little as
	possible. It appears only ONCE in your whole session, and you just have
	to press enter to make it disapear (no slipy yes/no buttons).

	* Forget old limitations with the number of pitch points per phoneme...
        use as many pitch points as you need (especially usefull for singing
	Mbrolas).

	* You can forget the pitch point requirements as well ( previously you
	 could not send more than 250 phonemes w/o pitch points ). Well, it
	 doesn't make much sense to play	flat speech, though it may be
	 usefull for debugging your application.

	* No more lower pitch limitation, you can generate vocal fry, deep 		smoker 
and Mozilla voices.

	* By popular demand, Volume Control in the DLL !

	* Phoneme cloning and renaming. The first possibility allows you to
	virtually map any phoneme set into any other and thus easily plug any
	Natural Language Processing module into any Mbrola database (well
	nearly any :-). You can even make some cross-language synthesis.

	* rebirth of full ascending compatibility (there was a flaw with
	databases older than 2.04)

	* More precise timing -> the size of the audio file you get is correct 
	(previously you had to insert a 0ms silence at the end of the pho file)

	* We have bought Purify from Pure software, and the code should be more 
	leak-free than ever.

	* Signal handling on Unix (to stop playback and reset the synth as
	requested by EmacsSpeak users )

	* Windows DLL -> you can directly connect your TTS to the synthesis
	engine with the new SetParser function.

6) MBROLI -> the PHO player for Windows takes advantage of the new
   features of the DLL. This program comes with the PCWIN version of mbrola
   The DLL and MBRPLAY now come with a lot of programming examples in C++ and
   visual Basic (see below)!!
  
7) MBREDIT -> another PHO player written by O. PLatteau, coming with
   source code in Visual Basic.

As allways, download everything on http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis and write 
to
mbrola@tcts.fpms.ac.be if you experience problems or bugs.

	Stay tuned

		  The Mbrola Team


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