bach

Bach

In the later years of his life, Johann Sebastion Bach became increasingly blind. His final works were dictated from his deathbed.

This project, Bach, provides text-to-speech as a service.

Up and running fast

I've provided a Vagrant setup that will get you up and running fast. Install the necessary gems using Bundler:

$ cd /path/to/checkout/of/bach
$ bundle

Ask Vagrant to bring up the server components for you:

$ cd /path/to/checkout/of/bach
$ bundle exec vagrant up

Ask Bach to translate a file full of text to an audio file:

$ cd /path/to/checkout/of/bach
$ bundle exec ./bin/bach < textfile > speech.mp3

That's it, text-to-speech with very little fuss.

Of course, if you want to use it as a real service on your network you'll probably want to set it up a little differently. See the following sections on Installing and Usage for information on how to setup your own text-to-speech service.

Installing

The server needs eSpeak and Lame installed. Mostly I do this using apt-get:

$ apt-get install espeak lame

You'll need a broker that talks Stomp somewhere on your network. I use Apache Apollo, and I'm not totally sure if the code uses anything that's specific to that. I'd love it to be broker-agnostic though, so if you have patches that'll bring this closer to reality please send them to me!

Usage

Run the server, somewhere that has eSpeak and Lame installed:

$ bachd --broker=stomp://mq.yourdomain.com:61613

Use the services on the command line. You don't need to have eSpeak installed on your client machines, just Bach.

A brief example of what interacting with Bach looks like, here converting the text of the Gettysberb address to an mp3:

$ curl -O http://history.eserver.org/gettysburg-address.txt
$ bach --broker=stomp://mq.yourdomain.com:61613 \
  < ./gettysburg-address.txt > ./gettysburg-address.mp3

I explicitly state the broker in the above commands but if you leave out that option it'll default to stomp://localhost:61613 ie it expects a broker running on your local machine if you don't tell it otherwise.

Authors

Craig R Webster http://barkingiguana.com/