---
name: "mbrola"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "mbrola"
version: "3.3+dfsg-9"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/mbrola"
---

# mbrola(1)

multilingual software speech synthesizer

## NAME

mbrola - multilingual software speech synthesizer

## SYNOPSIS

**mbrola** \[*options*\]*\<voice\_database\>*\<pho\_file\>...*\<output\_file\>*

## DESCRIPTION

**mbrola** is a  speech synthesizer  based  on the concatenation  of diphones. It takes a list of phonemes as input, together with prosodic information  (duration of phonemes  and a piecewise linear description of  pitch), and produces  speech samples  on 16  bits (linear), at the sampling frequency of the diphone database.

It is therefore NOT a Text-To-Speech  (TTS) synthesizer, since it does not accept raw text as input.  In  order to obtain  a full TTS system, you need to use this synthesizer in combination with a text processing system that produces phonetic and prosodic commands. For instance, you may use package **freephone** to obtain complete English TTS.

A \`-' instead of pho\_file or output\_file means stdin or stdout. Extension of output\_file ( raw, au, wav, aiff ) tells the wanted audio format.

## OPTIONS

**mbrola** understands following command line options.

- **-h**

  Show summary of options.

- **-i**

  Display the database information if any.

- **-e**

  Ignore fatal errors on unknown diphone.

- **-c comment\_char**

  Set COMMENT char (escape sequence in pho files).

- **-F flush\_command**

  Set FLUSH command name.

- **-v volume**

  Volume ratio. Float ratio applied to output samples.

- **-f freq\_ratio**

  Frequency ratio. Float ratio applied to pitch points.

- **-t time\_ratio**

  Time ratio. Float ratio applied to phone durations.

- **-l voice\_freq**

  Voice frequency. Target frequency for voice quality in Hz.

- **-R rename\_list**

  Phoneme rename list of the form: \`a A b B ...'

- **-C clone\_list**

  Phoneme clone list of the form: \`a A b B ...'

- **-I file**

  Initialization file containing one command per line. **CLONE**, **RENAME**, **VOICE**, **TIME**, **FREQ**, **VOLUME**, **FLUSH**, **COMMENT**, and **IGNORE** are available.

## SEE ALSO

[**freephone**(1)](/freephone/1.md), [**sox**(1)](/sox/1.md).\
 See /usr/share/doc/mbrola/readme.txt.gz for more info.

## AUTHOR

mbrola was written by Dr Thierry Dutoit \<dutoit@tcts.fpms.ac.be\>

This manual page was written by Igor B. Poretsky \<master@goga.energo.ru\>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).