Festival speaks at double speed!

This seems to happen with linux and sound hardware which cannot natively support mono audio. In the past if mono audio was sent to a stereo-only sound card, the driver would send a copy to both channels, now it splits it between the channels, effectively doubling the speaking rate and raising the pitch by an octave.

It is left to the audio application to now check the hardware and send something that it can handle. Until festival's audio code is updated this will cause problems with some hardware.

There are 2 quick fixes: An expensive one and a cheap one.

1. The expensive one is to get a decent sound card. This problem seems to occur mostly with cheap on-motherboard sound devices. Buy a reasonably priced SB16 or something.
   
   
2. The cheap fix is to use and external play program (like play from the sox package)

   Create the file festival/lib/siteinit.scm (if you don't already have it) and add the following

   (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
   (Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "sox -t raw -sw -r $SR $FILE -c2 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp")
   

   [back to Festival FAQ]
   
   If you can't find what you need to know here, try the festival-talk mailing list.