Py-marytts

- 100% Pure Java.
All native libraries have been removed from the system.
MARY should now run on any platform that has Java 1.5 or newer.
- Fully open source.
All code is now open source under the [​LGPL](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html), including German TTS.
Voices are distributed under Creative Commons or BSD licenses.
- Many languages and voices. In addition to several high-quality German and US English voices, this release adds four expressive British English voices built for the [SEMAINE project](http://www.semaine-project.eu/), a Turkish and a Telugu voice.
Also, we have made it easy to add more languages and voices in the future.
- New component installer.
New languages and voices can be installed using a new component installer tool.
If new languages and/or voices are made available for download, they can be installed without having to re-install the full system.

MARY now comes with a toolkit for people who want to add support for new languages or build their own voices.
There is detailed documentation for
- [creating initial support for a new language](http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/NewLanguageSupport);
- [recording and building a unit selection voice](http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/VoiceImportToolsTutorial); and
- [creating an HMM-based voice](http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/HMMVoiceCreationMary4.0) from the same recordings.

Changes since MARY 4.0 beta
- New British English expressive voices.
We are releasing the voices of four expressive characters built for the [​SEMAINE project](http://www.semaine-project.eu/).
- Improved Installer.
You can now install downloaded components without requiring an internet connection at install time.
The Installer handles updates of language and voice components correctly.
- Improved German pronounciation.
Several thousand words were added to the pronounciation lexicon, bringing the total number of German transcriptions to over 26,000.
Some bugs were fixed in the transcription of unknown words, making the synthesis of German more reliable.
- Added MBROLA voices.
There are still many people who use MARY with MBROLA diphone voices because of the control over prosody that they provide.
Therefore we have added MBROLA voices to this release.
They can be installed like the other voices through the MARY component installer.
- Voice creation tools were simplified.
The handling of external programs needed, in particular, for the creation of HMM-based voices was simplified.
We provide a script now that you can use to find or, if necessary, download and compile third-party software required for training HMM-based voices.

More details on individual issues addressed can be seen in the [list of tickets associated with this release](http://mary.opendfki.de/query?status=closed&group=resolution&milestone=4.0) and in the [list of tickets associated with the 4.0 beta release](http://mary.opendfki.de/query?status=closed&group=resolution&milestone=4.0+beta).

Tested environments

The MARY client and server code was tested on:
- Mac OS X (Intel) 10.5.8 with java 1.6.0_07
- Ubuntu Linux 8.10 and 9.04 with sun java 1.5, 1.6, and openjdk-6
- Windows XP and Vista

The web interface at ​http://localhost:59125 should work with any recent browser that supports AJAX.
We have obtained best results with:
- Firefox 3.5 with built-in audio support
- Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Safari 4, with Quicktime plugin

Known issues
- On Ubuntu Linux with sun java 1.5 and 1.6, we observed a problem with audio playback in the MARY client:
the final section is cut off.
With openjdk-6, it works ok.
- On Ubuntu Linux 8.10 with the builtin Firefox 3.0, the audio plugin doesn't work properly.
- Web interface in the browser Chrome suboptimal:
Chrome does not seem to handle the HTML 5 `<audio>` tag correctly.
It claims it can handle it, but then doesn't play audio.
Click on "Save audio file" to get the raw audio data.

Bug reports

Thanks to user feedback, we have fixed a number of bugs found in the beta release.
We are therefore confident that the system is ready for production use.
Nevertheless it is likely that new bugs will appear in new circumstances.

If you think you have identified a bug, proceed as follows:
1. Check in the [list of known bugs](http://mary.opendfki.de/query?group=status&amp;milestone=4.0) whether the bug has been reported already;
2. If you cannot find it, prepare your request to the mailing list.
Try to find out exactly:
- what to do to reproduce the error;
- expected behaviour;
3. Then send an informative email as described in the [FAQ](http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestionsbugreport).

Contributions

People interested in adding support for a language can get in touch, e.g. via the ​[MARY developers mailing list](http://www.dfki.de/mailman/listinfo/mary-dev).

This is a minor feature release, providing one important new feature and several bugfixes over previous MARY 3.5.0.

New feature:
- New tool for creating your own HMM-based voices for MARY (see tutorial at http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/HMMVoiceCreation)
Feedback and questions about building voices in MARY are welcome via the mary-users mailing list (http://www.dfki.de/mailman/listinfo/mary-users).

Bugfixes:
- Important for many will be that the "self-healing" capabilities of the MARY installation are now working again:
if you install an English system but a German voice, the system detects a misconfiguration and offers to download and install the missing components, and will start up normally after that.
- the full list of bugs fixed can be found on http://mary.opendfki.de/query?milestone=3.6

This release provides substantial new features while maintaining the API compatible to previous versions.

New features include:
- installer slimmed down to just over 30 MB, including some voices;
- separate voice installer tool, allowing you to download voices comfortably and with an integrity verification prior to installation;
- new synthesis technology:
Marcela Charfuelan ported the excellent HMM-based synthesis code from the HTS project (http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/) to Java - several HMM-based voices already ship with MARY;
- audio effects:
Oytun Turk implemented a range of audio effects that can be applied to the MARY voices, and can be controlled through the MARYGUIClient;
- voice creation toolkit:
Sathish Chandra Pammi and Anna Hunecke have cleaned up and [documented the tool](http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/VoiceImportToolsTutorial) we use for building new synthesis voices;
- voice recording tool "Redstart":
Mat Wilson has programmed a very nice GUI for recording new voices;
- OGG Vorbis support:
under Linux, the MARY server can now generate audio in OGG Vorbis format.

Ten months after the last stable release, a major milestone release is finally here:
MARY 3.1.0.

Its main features are:
- state of the art unit selection (English and German);
- support for two more platforms:
64 bit Linux and Mac OS X on Intel platforms;
- a voice creation toolkit (work in progress, see http://mary.opendfki.de/browser/tags/3.1.0/lib/modules/import/README for preliminary documentation if you want to try it out).

Thanks to those who have helped test the beta versions!
All the problems that we have become aware of should be fixed in this release.
For a reasonably complete list of issues addressed in this release, see http://mary.opendfki.de/milestone/3.1.0

Should you come across additional bugs, please post them to the mary-users mailing list (http://www.dfki.de/mailman/listinfo/mary-users).

Some background info:

The unit selection code released here has performed better-than-average in this year's Blizzard Challenge (http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/), showing that the system can be considered state-of-the-art.
For details, see:
http://www.dfki.de/~schroed/publications.htmlschroeder_hunecke2007a

The German voices have been created from the BITS corpora - for details, see:
http://www.dfki.de/~schroed/publications.htmlschroeder_hunecke2007

Highlights:
- Four German unit selection voices created from recordings in the BITS project;
- added acoustic models, which should also improve the English unit selection voices;
- added support for 64-bit linux and Intel Mac architectures.

On our to-do list are still many things, including:
- a well-documented and easy-to-use voice creation toolkit;
- smaller voices by using suitable speech coding for the databases.
- For more details, see the development page: http://mary.opendfki.de/milestone/3.1.0

Known issues with this release:
- diphone voices are basically broken. Don't install this version if you want to use diphone voices.
- only very limited testing on various platforms. Please report any errors you may find!

Release notes:

First beta release of the new unit selection code.
Try the new slt-arctic, bdl-arctic and jmk-arctic voices!

For some details of what has been done and what still needs to be done for the stable release, see the [full list of issues](http://mary.opendfki.de/milestone/3.1.0) on the development portal.