I tried running the festival app today with little success. I have a working festival installation that does TTS to the linux sound output perfectly. With * it just produces a sort of hissing sound. The length of hissing is proportional to the length of text string that it is given to speak. Since I'm running on a PPC system I fear the dreaded endian problem is to blame and that app_festival may need changing. Has anyone else experienced similar problems? Iain