Simultaneous playback
The festival
text-to-speech synthesizer seems to use normal ALSA playback instead of PulseAudio. This leads to it failing when there’s already something playing. E.g. if you’re listening to music with Rhythmbox, festival fails with this message:
Linux: can't open /dev/dsp
Code language: HTTP (http)
To make it use PulseAudio, we can re-route the audio through the pacat
utility as proposed on this bugreport. Just add these few lines to your /usr/share/festival/init.scm
:
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "pacat --channels=1 --rate=$SR $FILE")
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'raw)
Code language: PHP (php)
Note: I had to use raw
as the required format since the snd
from the bugreport gave me loud noise instead of speech. raw
works fine.
Announcing system errors
On fedorabook.com I found this little script which will read every new line from /var/log/messages
:
#!/bin/bash
tail -0f /var/log/messages | sed "s/^[^:]*:[^:]*:[^:]*: //" | while read LINE
#tail -0f /var/log/syslog | sed "s/^[^:]*:[^:]*:[^:]*: //" | while read LINE
#tail -0f /var/log/auth.log | sed "s/^[^:]*:[^:]*:[^:]*: //" | while read LINE
#tail -0f /var/log/user.log | sed "s/^[^:]*:[^:]*:[^:]*: //" | while read LINE
do
echo $LINE
echo $LINE | festival --tts
sleep 0.75
done
Code language: PHP (php)