Installing Festival
The main assignment instructions assume you are using the installation of Festival on the computers in the PPLS Appleton Tower (AT) labs (either in-person or using the remote desktop). This is the recommended option for the course.
However, if you really want, you can install Festival directly onto your computer, though please note the amount of support we can give you for this is limited. In our experience, difficulties in installing Festival vary a lot depending on your computer architecture. Debugging this generally requires an understanding of how programs are compiled on the command line and may involve editing make files etc.
If you’ve never compiled code before, and don’t have much experience with the unix command line, your best bet is to use the PPLS AT Lab computers.
Festival requires a unix like environment (Linux or MacOS, or a Linux style terminal runnning on Windows) and require you to compile some code (some install instructions are linked here).
Please note that we have not thoroughly checked these install instructions in the last year!
Installation guidance
You can get the source code from the Festvox website or the festvox github page.
Macbook: Here’s a gist outlining the steps Catherine used to install Festival on her Macbook (run the commands in the terminal): Link to gist. Also see these forum posts:
- https://speech.zone/forums/topic/festival-error-setting-input-audio-stream-format
- i.e., you may need to install sox to play audio and add some lines to the
config.scmfile mentioned in in Step-by-Step
- i.e., you may need to install sox to play audio and add some lines to the
- https://speech.zone/forums/topic/installing-festival-on-a-newer-mac-e-g-missing-makefile
This gist also gives direct download links for the relevant zipped code archives. Please note, that you are required to use a specific voice for this assignment (cstr_edi_awb_arctic_multisyn). The data required for this voice is not publicly available, so you will need to download this from the PPLS AT lab servers (see Assignment Data below and gist link).
To install Festival from you will generally need to be able to compile C++ code. If you’ve never done this before, this may be rather daunting and you may need to install extra tools (e.g. Xcode command line tools for MacOS). If you use Ubuntu, you can also install it using the apt package manager (e.g. apt-get install festival or possibly just apt install festival).
Ubuntu Linux: See instructions in this gist for installing Festival on Ubuntu. Some issues have been reported installing Festival from source on Ubuntu (as in the gist above). You can find some notes and an alternative way to do this using the Ubuntu package manager here.
Windows: If you have a windows machine and but want to install Festival on your computer, you might like to try the Ubuntu on Windows. See also Ubuntu on WSL. See the Ubuntu instructions below.
You can also have a look in the forums for other tips on how to do this!
Just another reminder though that you don’t have to install Festival yourself! It’s fine just to use the lab machines!
Assignment Data
If you are using your own Festival install, you will need to get the voice database and dictionaries used to run the voice (voice:cstr_edi_awb_arctic_multisyn, dictionary:unilex). You can find instructions by following this link.