jingle

Quickly generate a Jingle using Text-to-Speech

Sometimes you just quickly need a short jingle with a bumper, and have no speaker available. Or sit hundreds of miles away and must do it on your server.

This is a little bash script that does just that, using a TTS (Text-to-Speech) engine in a nice way. It can:

• generate an MP3 file from either PicoTTS (local) or gtts (Google TTS)
• perform a little sound optimization on the TTS voice (bass/treble correction, compressor/limiter)
• add a starting/ending bumper, using a sound file
• add starting/ending silence (for dumb crossfaders)
• add a nice ID3 tag (fills in Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre)
• perform ReplayGain calculation and add ReplayGain tags using loudgain

Requirements

You’ll need:

• a Linux machine (can even be your server)
• sox installed
• pico2wave (from PicoTTS) —or— gtts-cli (Google TTS)
• mid3iconv from the Mutagen package (optional)
• loudgain for ReplayGain (optional)
• a minimum understanding of how to edit code. No worries. It’s very well commented!

Installation

1. Download jingle, make it executable, and put it somewhere in your path. ~/bin, ~/.local/bin or /usr/local/bin are good places.
2. Install missing dependencies (see above).
3. Edit jingle using a text editor and change output folder and bumper sound file:

   media_folder="$(xdg-user-dir MUSIC)/Other/Jingles/Programm/"

   logo="$(xdg-user-dir MUSIC)/Other/Sounds/MCH/Whoosh2.flac"

4. Read the comments at the beginning of the file—you might want to change other options like:
   • TTS engine
   • TTS language
   • silence generation at start and end (specify in seconds)
   • Album and Genre ID3 tags
   • comment out the play command at the end of the file

Make a jingle

The syntax is jingle filename text to speak. Use quotes as appropriate. The filename part will also be used as the ID3 Title tag, so use a "speaking" name.

Typing jingle without parameters shows a little help screen.

Let’s make a test jingle:

jingle 'This is a test' 'This is only a test.'

It will be processed, played aloud and and stored in media_folder. Depending on your installed software, it should have correct ID3 tags and ReplayGain data.

Here is the audio generated by above command:
https://github.com/Moonbase59/jingle/raw/master/This%20is%20a%20test.mp3

The auto-generated ID3 tags look like this:

Hint: If working on a server (no audio hardware), comment out the play command at the end!

Enjoy!