Speaking the song title of the next song to be played would kind of be annoying. I don't see much point in getting TTS working and having a wave file per FID. Imagine hearing the track names spoken in between the tracks of "Dark Side of the Moon". Ick.

On the other hand, TTS for browsing the Playlists would be rad. I believe that would take a change to the player software, though. It would be weird to hear the menu being spoken over a song, though. A TTS enable/disable function would be needed, because sometimes you would like to hear the TTS while browsing the menu (picking playlists on the fly) and other times you don't (EQ settings, etc.). I could even see an option of pausing the current playback while browsing with TTS.

I believe that would take a change to the player software

Nah, we just need Mark to add OCR functionality to the kernel to read the current menu item and then pass the text to the TTS engine...

...only kidding Mark !



P.S. It wouldn't actually need to be "proper" OCR as the characters will always be perfectly formed on screen, so it is more screen scraping than OCR.

Ive tried to install the tts program now and i dont get the permissions right..... When i try to chmod the date/pcmplay/setvol files i get "chmod: date: Read-only file system"
Allthoug i have used rw.... and then i used rw /drive0 (dont know if thats possible.... but it was a try) rw command works.... but i still cant chmod the files.... I cant get it why it doesnt work.... it should....
Then all of a sudden i lost all contact with the empeg over ethernet.. allthough the kftpd has started´and listens to port 21.. dont think this has anything to with the tts though....

ahh.... i just figured out the ethernet issue.... According to norton internet security the empeg tried to connect to a trojan horse port.... and therefore has been banned.... It worked out when i added the empeg as a "trusted site"....

Cant still get the chmod to work....

well....... I guess i solved now....I used the chmod command through ftp instead..... wich worked out just fine.... still cant figure out though why the hell i couldnt do it through the command shell....

rwm

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And as for it being 2 hours behind that is because the player software has its own timezone setting that this program can't read. The only way around this that I see is to set your timezone as "Universal" or "UTC" in the empeg player app and then set your clock accordinly.

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I wouldn't do that, because you'll lose DST switching and you'll also lose easy country adjustment when you travel abroad. Instead, set the TZ environment variable in the shell you're running your code from (and export it, of course). (I assume tts-clock uses localtime(), not gmtime()).

If I set the TZ in the player settings to Eastern, and reset the time, it shows fine on the player, but tts says the time 5 hours ahead, along with the actual time of the OS being 5 hours ahead. I check this by telneting in and creating a dir, the time for it is set 5 hours ahead. So I don't think this is a tts problem, but with the players inability to change the timezone for the linux OS but only for itself?

Yeah, when I looked at it the default libc on the empeg is looking in the wrong place for timezone files. It should be possible to work around that by adding

export TZDIR=/usr/share/zoneinfo
export TZ=EST

to a .bashrc, or the top of whatever script you start.

well seeing as i'd like the TZ to be correct for the whole system (player software and OS), would it be possible to create a link pointing to the correct place?

So if I'm understanding right, the player software is changing a file that the OS doesn't use to determine it's Timezone? Then making a link to it will allow the setting in the player software to change the time for everything?

Hi, I just installed your tts welcome script. It worked great. Directions were very easy to follow, even though its not that difficult. I tested the program before i rebooted the empeg, and it worked great. However during startup she stutters pretty badly I've attached an MP3

Edit: DoH! too big Click here for the mp3

The TTS Clock program reads the local time from the operating system, not the UTC. But the local time is set to UTC for some reason. So if you manage to change the operating system time zone the TTS Clock will use it.

Hmm, thats strange. In my first release, I had it as M10tts instead of B10tts. It should be a B script so that it doesn't run concurrently with anything. If you happened to install the first version did you make sure to delete the M10tts before putting on the B10tts? Do you have any other M scripts running? I think that since my B script mounts the drives that other M scripts might be launched simultaneously to the B10tts script.

If you do have other M scripts, I think that since my B script mounts the file system you can rename your M scripts to a B script that is alphabetically after the B10tts script and it should work.

I have posted TTS Clock R4 at http://www.zabaware.com/empeg

This new version fixes the problems it had with saying AM/PM correctly at 12 PM and 12 AM. It also replaces saying "Welcome" with "Good Morning", "Good Afternoon", or "Good Evening" based on the time of day.

If you have a R3 and don't want to download the entire package you can get the updated script at http://www.zabaware.com/empeg/B10tts and download the 3 new pcm files http://www.zabaware.com/empeg/morning.pcm http://www.zabaware.com/empeg/afternoon.pcm and http://www.zabaware.com/empeg/evening.pcm

All set now, updated to r4, changed my telnet, and launcher scripts to B scripts. Now everything sounds great!

The good morning/evening is a very nice touch!

Now i'm having the same time problem as everyone else, my clock is set correctly, tz is set to eastern, player shows the correct clock, but the system clcok is 5 hours ahead. Anybody figure this one out yet?

so far i've found two articles on how to change the system timezone

here and here

The system was setup so there was a link called localtime in /usr/share/zoneinfo pointing to a nonexistent /etc/localtime. So I created a a link: /etc/localtime to point to /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern .. thus making the /usr/share/zoneinfo/localtime link valid. Also as one of those articles points out I create the link: /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules to point to localtime (renaming the already existing posixrules to posixrules.disabled).

All of this and so far no dice .. gonna play with it a bit more.

Upon examination of the posixrules file (vi) I found one of the only readable texts in it "singapore" ... i'm wondering if this was the default TZ or something.

Let me set everyone straight on Unix timezone stuff.

The kernel has no real concept of a time zone.

On most Unix systems, the default time zone is set by init. It does this by setting the TZ environment variable in its own environment. Since all processes are children of init, all processes inherit that TZ environment variable.

However, when a process is run, it doesn't make any difference who set the TZ variable that it inherits.

On the empeg, the init process is not the init process that is going to be on most general purpose Unix systems. It does not (I'm pretty sure) deal with the time zone at all. This has the effect of setting the ``system'' TZ to UTC.

The time zone that you set in the player changes the time zone for the player. I don't know if it does this by setting the TZ variable or if it deals with figuring the local time itself, but it doesn't really make any difference, since no other process will ever use that setting (unless you could get the player to fork a new process).

I'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve here, but if you want to be able to record the local time zone, then you're going to have to figure out how to do it for your process. It might be possible for preinit to set the time zone by reading in a configuration file, and it would actually pass that to init, but I don't know what it might break by changing the player's time zone. It might make a dual offset, or it might do the right thing. I don't know. Preinit cannot do this now, but it wouldn't be too hard to hack it in.

HTH.

Does anyone know where the empeg player app stores its time zone settings? If its easily readable by grep or something like that I could modify the TTS Clock to read the timezone and compensate for the correct hour.

I've also just noticed that, on ac power, the volume doesn't set in the player to the last volume setting, but the setting from the time player. Is there anyway that this can be fixed?
I haven't tested this on dc power, i haven't let my office yet, but i will soon.

does anyone have a sample of the script as a wav file. im curious how it all sounds together.

btw, your first mention was to include the drivers name in the good morning, is this still a possibility i take it. seems like it would be pretty straight forward.

here you go

I know youve talked about the TTS to eventually read the menu and song/playlists. But that requires some new features in hijack right?.... Wouldnt it be possible to use one of the input ports on the new Tuner II.....( I seem to remember there was going to be 2 extra availeble inputs) to hook up a mic so that we could have speech commands. Like next/play/pause/mute and so on.... I guess the port is to slow perhaps.... Dont know the speed of it, or the requirements to get good speech recognition....
But its one idea i would love to see get bourne into reality...

The player already has a mic input for just such a purpose, there's just no software to use it.

Recognizing even just a short list of commands like that is relatively complicated, especially in a non-ideal environment... accents, noisy road, music playing, maybe you drive a topless car, knowing when you're talking to the Empeg and not to your wife about pausing for a moment to think about your daughter's play next week, etc.

"What is the interest level in the empeg community to getting TTS as I described working? "

I'm all about this app.... lets do it! I will help out anyhow I can!

Is there a way to fix the volume to -12db while in the car? sometimes i leave it at -3 for music, but that's way too loud for the program's voice, it's ripping my speakers!

i had to type:

literal site rw
literal site chmod 755 [filename]

i had to add "literal site" before my commands at my dos prompt, ftp shell.

im interested as well. writing the windows application to generate the wav files of your directory structure is the easy part and i think step 1. but interupting the basic function of the player to play these wav files might be difficult. isnt that stuff closed source? someone with experience might know. If this isnt and issue than i think we might have the ability to get started soon.

You can edit the the B10tts with a good text editor to set a fixed volume. First, I reccomend using an editor called UltraEdit (don't convert to DOS mode). Its available from www.ultraedit.com You can do it with notepad, but it is hard to read as it doesn't show the Unix style line breaks as line breaks but as boxes. Find the line that says:

/drive0/var/setvol

and add a number after it to set the volume, for example:

/drive0/var/setvol 40

will set your volume at 40% (I don't know what db level this corresponds with, play around with it)

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im interested as well. writing the windows application to generate the wav files of your directory structure is the easy part and i think step 1. but interupting the basic function of the player to play these wav files might be difficult. isnt that stuff closed source? someone with experience might know. If this isnt and issue than i think we might have the ability to get started soon.

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I don't think it would be too hard for someone that has more progamming experience then me. The program hijack already does a lot of things with the player app without access to its source code. In order for TTS to announce the name of a song that is about to play all that it would need to do is monitor the filesystem for an FID file to be launched by the player app. When it detects it, it could send the pause key to the player, making the player think someone pressed the pause key. While it is paused it would play the prerecorded TTS file associated with that particular FID. Once the prerecorded TTS finishes playing, it would send the pause key to the player app again to resume playback of the MP3 file.

It's actually a lot easier than that. Hijack doesn't have to monitor the file system, everything needed (artist, title, etc.) is available in /proc/empeg_notify.

Though having a prerecorded TTS file for every song on my empeg seems a little... um... wasteful. I dunno.

I don't even understand the concept of wanting to have each song announced. I mean, it says what the song is right on the screen. How long does it take to read that? You know what it is anyway.

But whatever.