Wren

The new version can be installed from Wren itself, or it can be downloaded from the Wren site ; I’ve added a zip there or you can use the installer.

The change is with eSpeak which now fully uses eSpeak NG. The previous Wren used some info from the 32 bit eSpeak. This also means that there are a lot more voices available but a simple install of eSpeak NG will not bring them all.

I’ll add some info on setting up eSpeak at a later stage, but it boils down to first installing eSpeak NG and then downloading the eSpeak NG sources from github to extract the espeak-ng-data folder from it and copy the voices info from there over your local eSpeak version [in Program fles/eSpeak NG/espeak-ng-data] this does not seem to break anything … anyway .. more will follow.

Basically … I have been using Wren for a couple of years now without feeling the need to make any changes or updates to it. And I have been pretty happy with it - ran some live shows with it and made a good hand full of recordings from self playing patches.

However … a short while ago it was brought to my attention that the eSpeak module is not working properly. Looking into his blog [ https://bluehell.nl/blogje/index.php/2023/12/30/found-some-bugs/ ] made me realize that I had already kown this .. but had completely forgotten.

Anyway - I’ve started working on eSpeak again .. with a couple of conclusions sofar:

*) windows 7 and eSpeak is troublesome - this may be solved with eSpeak-ng BTW … win7 complains about an xaudio dll not being present .. there is some web bla bla about this - use your search engine.

*) I’m actually using eSpeak-ng, and not eSpeak and this works not completely the same [and I did not realize this nor that].

*) eSpeak-ng works now .. but not completely … I’ve made a secret test release [which works for me] but not an official one yet.

*) whisper and croak etc still do not work - and I do not yet know why that would be.

More to follow …

Edit: ok .. after undoing a bugfix I did today .. whispering & such works agakin - cool - will do a release soon I guess