Festival MBROLA info

This page is designed to provide the necessary information to get MBROLA voices working with festival. This is a three stage process.

Install the festival voice wrapper.
Get the MBROLA voice and binary.
Install the voice and binary in the correct place.

Here is the procedure for voice us1, but the same applies for the other voices.

Install the festival voice wrapper

Untar the package: festvox_us1.tar.gz in the same directory as you untared festival.

Get the MBROLA voice and binary

Goto http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html and click on the download link. You need to download the MBROLA binary and the voice(s) you require, here that is American English Female. (for us1)

Install the MBROLA voice and binary

The files come in zip format, so you need to use unzip to extract them. The names of the zip files may change with later versions, so if it is called something slightly different don't worry.

Installing the binary

The zipfile for the binary (mbr301h.zip) contains the files:
mbrola
readme.txt.

Unzip this file (unzip mbr301h.zip) and copy the mbrola binary to somewhere sensible. Suggested places are: /usr/local/bin for system wide availability or [festival_install_dir]/festival/lib/etc/[architecture_dir].

Installing the voice(s)

The voice itself then needs to be installed in the directory created by installing its festival wrapper. for the us1 voice this is [festival_install_dir]/festival/lib/voices/english/us1_mbrola, unzip the voice zipfile inside this directory.

Hopefully that should be it. Run festival and type: (voice_us1_mbrola) to select the new voice.

Important Note

There are MBROLA voices available for many different language on the MBROLA site. These will only work with Festival where there are existing langauge resources (lexicons, letter to sound rules, intonation models, etc...) available for use in Festival.