Festival Virtual Singer

Festival Virtual Singer is a native Windows application for composing simple vocal sequences with the Festival Speech Synthesis System and for building sample-based performances from WAV recordings.

It combines two complementary workflows:

• Festival Singer — write notes and rests, assign phonemes, choose a Festival voice, preview the result, and export singing-mode XML or WAV audio.
• Sample Slicer — import WAV files, inspect their waveforms, create and loop slices, arrange them in a polyphonic piano roll, and render the arrangement offline.

Main Features

• Piano-roll note editing with pitch, duration, phoneme, rests, snapping, drag and resize operations.
• Festival voice selection, direct sequence playback, selected-phoneme preview, and WAV export.
• Singing-mode XML import and export with application metadata.
• Undo and redo in the Festival editor.
• WAV Sample Pool with metadata inspection and Windows preview.
• Waveform zooming, selection, manual slicing, and transient or uniform auto-slicing.
• Editable slice start, loop-in, loop-out, end, root note, and loop state.
• Realtime WinMM slice audition with retrigger and legato modes.
• A dedicated polyphonic Slicer Piano Roll with velocity, loop-aware duration snapping, clipboard editing, marquee selection, and transport controls.
• Project folders that keep the song, sample copies, slices, and arrangement together.
• Offline stereo WAV rendering of the Slicer arrangement.
• Diagnostic files for Festival discovery, synthesis commands, and piano-roll drag operations.

Requirements

The supplied Visual Studio project targets a legacy-compatible Windows toolchain:

• Windows 10 or later
• Win32 / x86
• Visual Studio 2013 and platform toolset v120
• wxWidgets 3.2.x static libraries
• Festival 2.4 and Edinburgh Speech Tools 2.4
• A compatible 32-bit FestivalTTSCOM.dll

Festival, the COM component, and the application must use the same 32-bit architecture.

Getting Started

1. Build or install the required Festival runtime and wxWidgets libraries.
2. Build FestivalSingModeWx.vcxproj as Release | Win32.
3. Place the Festival runtime beside the executable as described in the Wiki.
4. Start the application and choose either the Festival Singer or Sample Slicer workflow.

For a practical walkthrough, see Tutorial.md. Full reference documentation is available in the project Wiki.

Repository Overview

The application is split into focused C++ modules for the song model, Festival bridge, piano rolls, sample pool, waveform editor, slice model, realtime sample engine, automatic slicing, event timing, and offline rendering.

Diagnostics

Runtime diagnostics are written next to the executable:

• festival_path_diagnostics.txt
• festival_singing_trace.txt
• M11_DRAG_DIAGNOSTIC.log

These files are useful when Festival cannot be discovered, synthesis fails, or Slicer drag behavior needs inspection.

License

Festival Virtual Singer is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3. See LICENSE.