ATIS sound quality verification

[SilverBullet]

Hi everybody,
finally found the time to grab some audio files with ATIS information.
As a reference these files were recorded while flying between WYP and BAM.
Engine sounds were disabled. I recorded three ATIS stations, Köln-Bonn, Düsseldorf and Dortmund
and converted them to MP3 files (each one between 700k and 1MB).
https://beta.hidrive.com/share/v9sd7o33ha
Is that the expected quality or do I have a sound problem on my system (Debian Linux stable)?
I seem to remember that the quality was significantly better with the old 3.x Flightgear, but I might be wrong.
All other sounds (video, web-radio, MP3, OGG) are prefectly OK.

Anyway, a big thanks to everyone involved in the Flightgear development.

[sanhozay]

They sound a bit rough to me. I don't mean the sound quality -- the voice synthesis is different from my system (Ubuntu 15.04). Yours is more robotic and less intelligible.

[SilverBullet]

Spot on!

Just tested 'espeak' with bash and 'espeakedit' on my system and the generated voice files sound significantly better.
It seems as if the voices generated within flightgear cause those problems.
I also check my build history and couldn't find any major problems.
very strange...

[sanhozay]

This is what mine sounds like. I used the internal microphone on another computer so the audio recording isn't the best but you can hear the quality of the speech synthesis.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/283 ... s/edkk.mp3

The words "hectopascal" and "contact" are clearly different between your and my recording.

EDIT: you are probably aware of this, but Flightgear is using the Flite_HTS engine for synthesizing ATIS: http://hts-engine.sourceforge.net. You might want to try some phrases in the demo web page: http://flite-hts-engine.sp.nitech.ac.jp

[SilverBullet]

OK, I compiled 2016.4.1 on my system and the voice problem is still there.
Tried both versions (system installed Flite_HTS and FG internal Flite_HTS) and got the same results.
I'm inclined to believe that somehow my system is broken in a very peculiar way.
Probably next week I'll install the stuff on my friends Linux system and check the results.

[sanhozay]

Have you tried the developer mailing list? There are at least two Debian developers I know of who read and contribute to it.

[SilverBullet]

No, haven't done that yet. Before causing that amount of trouble for the developers, I'd like to make sure that the problem isn't on my side.
I thought about this for quite a while and I believe the last time I had a clean voice output with FG was BEFORE switching to pulseaudio. My friends computer has definitely no pulseaudio running.
I'll check that next week.