Festival: can’t open /dev/dsp [Solved]
By nick | Tech Support22 Nov 2011
After spending way too much time attempting to get the “Festival” speech synthesizer working on Linux without getting the dreaded “can’t open /dev/dsp” error message, I’ve finally found the solution.
Just on a side note, the Arch Linux help page for Festival, suggests a fix that uses the “aplay” application, this is something which no longer seems to exist in the package mirrors.
Here’s the solution for getting Festival to work:
echo “It finally worked” | padsp festival –tts
The trick here being launching Festival with “padsp” before it.
Feel free to leave a comment if this worked for you or you encountered a problem.