iWarp and Festival
November 28th, 2007 by heathenxHas anyone checked out episode 021 of Meet The GIMP? In it Rolf explains how to use the iWarp filter in the GIMP. I can honestly say that I had never noticed that filter before. I thought perhaps it was new in GIMP 2.4. A quick check on my son’s ubuntu 6.10 rig with GIMP 2.2 verified that iWarp was there in that release as well.
Anyway, my point to this is that iWarp is a lot of fun to play with. I think my kids and I played with it for about an hour last night. We transformed quite a few pictures of ourselves into something that looked out of this world. I recommend that you watch Rolf’s video. You’ll likely learn a new skill if you hadn’t already tried iWarp.
Additionally, I came across a post last night regarding festival for Linux. Festival is a text-to-speech synthesizer. So basically it takes text and converts it to sound…think, “Do you want to play a game?” from the movie War Games.
If you are on ubuntu then you can “sudo apt-get install festival” to install it. openSUSE with Smart takes a “sudo smart install festival”. After it is installed you can simply open a terminal and type “echo “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” | festival –tts” to get it to say something. Make sure your speakers are turned up. Also, you can create a text file called “festival.txt” for instance. Write some text inside of it and save it to your /home/user/ directory. Now fire up a terminal and “festival –tts festival.txt”. It will read whatever you have written in your test file.
Obviously, festival gets old after the first 10 minutes of use but it’s another one for the kids. I even let then write some swear words just so that my computer would play them back. That never gets old.
Now go waste some time playing with these things. 
November 28th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Festival is a lot of fun for someone with such an immature sense of humour like myself. But personally I can spend more than 10 minutes entering swear words without getting bored.;)
Actually, Dave Yates incorporates festival into his excellent lottalinuxlinks podcast (http://lottalinuxlinks.com/podcast) as his sidekick Lynn. Very entertaining sometimes actually.
And thanks for reminding me about Gimp being at 2.4 now. I’m still running 2.2.17 on my XP box here at work. Now downloading the installer for 2.4 and upgrading.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
I hadn’t heard of festival before last night. What does Dave use to change the voice (female)? I would love for mine to sound like Paris Hilton.
Be prepared for Gimp 2.4. I had to take a few minutes and re-learn some things. Cropping a picture, for example, has really changed. I have gotten used to it though and now I prefer it over the old way.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
More than a few listeners have asked him that. He’s promised to do a podcast about it when he remembers how the heck he did it (it was so long ago I guess). But that’s Dave.
I think you’d enjoy his podcast, he’s a good guy.
As far as Paris Hilton, I don’t think the voice he uses is that good.. still robotic, but it grows on you. He makes very creative use of it sometimes.
I’ll check out the new version of Gimp now. I’ve just installed it. Cropping is one of the most common things I use Gimp for, so I’ll have to see how it changed.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Festival use only english.
But it’s a good project for some people who need helps…
I tried it by the past. I wrote a french phrase and the result was horrible
November 28th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
@Eclipse
Have you seen this?
http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html
November 29th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Ok. I didn’t realize that there are several graphical frontends to festival under KDE…namely, Kmouth and KSayIt. I installed kdeaccessibility3 and got everything that I needed. I haven’t tried it but it looks like I can change voices from male to female and change languages too. Cool!