Re: [gnuspeech-contact] what's the status?

[David Hill]

Hi Rob,

This an initial response to the second part of your email.

On Feb 2, 2006, at 11:20 PM, Robert Brewer wrote:

> David,

[snip]

> My timescale is pretty flexible.  :)

Join the club!

> Even so, I might
> be willing to help out with separating out a batch
> version of the real-time Monet.  I guess I'm trying
> to feel out what that would involve.  Though I am
> quite competent with C++, I have never touched
> ObjC or GNUstep.

Somewhat hurried -- its late.

Objective C is not so different from C++.  IMHO, it is cleaner.
Not being a C++ guru I hesitate to comment to fully, but
one important difference is the absence of multiple
inheritance.  The cognoscenti say that there is only a requirement
for multiple inheritance if you don't do the OO design properly in the
first place.  In fact, "Protocols" in Objective C allow much the
same sort of effects to be achieved, but in a cleaner way.

The easiest way to get a handle on the stuff is to read some code.

There's a useful book by Aaron Hillegass that serves as an intro
("Cocoa programming for Mac OS X -- Addison Wesley 2004
ISBN 0-321-21314-9) and the book "Cocoa Programming" by
Anguish, Buck and Yacktman (SAMS 2003 ISBN 0-672-32230-7)
provides more detail, but has the slight disadvantage that it predated
the Mac Xcode system that replaced Project Builder, though that is  
minor).

These books are useful because there is Mac code up on the savannah site
for gnuspeech (see under "Current").  Stephen Kochan's book:
"Programming in Objective-C" (SAMS "Developers Library 2004
ISBN 0-672-32586-1) is not tied to the Mac, but gives an idea of
the universality of the various flavours of Objective C and is a very
good book.  AFAIK you could develop using Objective-C under GNU/Linux
without worrying about GnuStep (or Mac stuff) because if you stuck to
a non-interactive system, you wouldn't need all the Interface Builder
stuff, which is why the port of the interactive apps is such a much more
difficult job and requires the equivalent of all the NeXTSTEP/OpenStep
Interface Building stuff to make it reasonably doable.

You'd have to look in the Monet code to see just what modules need
to be extracted and sewn together.  There's the (awful-and-needing-
redoing) letter-to-sound module -- OK for now, and the dictionary.   
There's the parsing for
the text input, and the application of the rules to the parsed input  
to produce
the parameters needed by the TRM synthesiser, and tube.c which converts
he parameters into audio files.  The diagram on the savannah  
gnuspeech web
home page gives an idea of the real-time Monet core.

Obviously I'm working in Xcode/Cocoa and aiming at GnuStep, but I  
believe there's a
straight Objective-C system under Linux from recent comments I've  
seen.  Greg
Casamento was working on making the Mac source compile under GnuStep,  
but
without the need for the GUIs, I am sure something independent of  
GnuStep could
be done for GNU/Linux.  I haven't heard from Greg for a while.

I'll do some more digging and get back to you.  Sorry I'm not up to  
speed on this.

Probably someone reading this list can provide some better info.

All good wishes.

david

> If I were to strip some part
> of the codebase down to the barebones batch
> engine (text file in, sound file out), I would have ObjC code
> which relies on GNUstep, right?  Do you know off-hand
> in what file I would look to see the text input?
> I think I cant start tracing the code if I have someplace
> to grab on.
>
> I checked out the manuals on your site and they helpde
> me understand what's going on a bit better.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Rob
> --
> Robert W. Brewer
>
>
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