I don't really know what I'm talking about. But I'll talk anyway. Access to a hard disk is still not as fast as it is to RAM. But Windows can access so much more RAM than DOS could, that I think software can be optimized to put into memory the things it needs the most. In DOS, before extended memory was well understood, programs were more disk-intensive and could be speeded up by converting some memory above the 640K limit into a RAM drive. I never hear of anyone promoting the use of a RAM drive in Windows, so there must be reasons why it is better to let Windows and your software manage their memory usage. I would say, though, that if you are trying to use a concatenative synthesizer and you only have 1 GB of system RAM, it will sometimes be problematic, and would improve somewhat with 2 or more GB.
You can get a little insight into what is happening if you look at Task Manager, and set it up so that it shows all running processes. The keyboard shortcut for this is ctrl-shift-Escape, and you read some of the output with your mouse pointer. Check the status line at the bottom, which tells you how many processes are running and how much memory and processor percentage they are using in total. Use F5 often to refresh the display. Running processes is the second tab of this tabbed dialog box. Look at this information from time to time and you can tell when a process has gotten stuck, when your antivirus program is working hard, etc. You can Google for the names of some of the running processes and get some information about them. But the pages which come up offer to run optimization software for you. I would not fall for such offers. Even if I have only two or three applications running, under XP I often have 45 to 55 processes running, and there is not much you can or should do about that. Under Windows 7 I may have 70 processes running, but I have 4 GB of RAM in those systems instead of the 1 GB in this one or the 2 GB at work. Optimize with care! Lloyd Rasmussen, W3IUU, Kensington, Maryland Home: http://lras.home.sprynet.com Work: http://www.loc.gov/nls http://facebook.com/lloyd.rasmussen > -----Original Message----- > From: Joe Lanier [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2011 1:53 PM > To: [email protected]; [email protected] > Subject: RE: speech breaking up and distorting > > Lloyd, > > In the good ol days, we use to have what was called a ram disk. I am > wondering if that would help. I know that disk access has become much > faster, but, does it meet or exceed the i/o rates possible with physical > memory? Just a thought. > > Warm Regards.. Joe Lanier > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lloyd Rasmussen [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2011 9:54 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: speech breaking up and distorting > > I think that David's advice was pretty good. The AT&T, Ivona, Neospeech > and > other modern SAPI voices are concatenative synthesizers. They need to > throw > more than a hundred megabytes of data around in order to string speech > units > together. When you alter their speed or pitch, they have to work a little > harder, still. DecTalk and Eloquence speech will always be a lot more > responsive because they compute speech parameters and generate audio from > scratch, rather than having to look up the speech units in a database. > Microsoft Sam, Mike, Ana and Mary fall in between on the processor > utilization scale, I think. > > I don't know whether any of our technology is taking advantage of multi- > core > processors or not. But disk and memory access may still be a bottleneck. > If you want to run these high-end synthesizers, you'll have to limit what > other stuff is running simultaneously. > > Lloyd Rasmussen, Kensington, Maryland > Home: http://lras.home.sprynet.com > Work: http://www.loc.gov/nls > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Jenine Stanley [mailto:[email protected]] > > Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 8:32 AM > > To: [email protected] > > Subject: speech breaking up and distorting > > > > I have 2 computers and they both are having an odd issue lately with > > their synthesizers. Both run WE 7.5 > > > > Desktop runs Windows7, with Ivona Kendra speech synthesizer. > > > > From time to time the speech will break up, like an old radio that's > > poorly tuned. Sometimes also when adjusting the pitch, which I like at > > 2, the speech will become distorted as if it's too loud though the > > volume hasn't changed at all. The breaking up tends to fix itself but > > the distortion requires a complete reboot of the computer, not just > > shutting down WE and restarting. > > > > Laptop is running Windows XP with the AT&T Crystal synthesizer. I have > > WE start prior to log in and nothing has changed with the DECTalk > > speech. The last several days, when I boot up, and the speech changes > > over to Crystal, the voice is very distorted as if through a bad AM > > radio speaker. This is continuous, unlike the desktop computer issue. > > The only way to fix it is to exit WE and restart it. Then the speech > > returns to normal. > > > > Any idea what might be going on here? If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
