Copyright Mick McMillan 2001, bx2fest, Local::Irclog::Bitchx, and related
files may be copied, modified, distributed, used under the same terms as Perl.

bx2fest is a scheme that allows one to hear IRC conversations rather than just
reading them. For people who frequent low-traffic channels this allows leaving
the IRC window on a different desktop and just forgetting about it until
something interesting happens.
bx2fest uses the Festival Speech Syntesis System, Free software from the
University of Edinburgh. If you don't mind buying and installing IBMs Via
Voice, I recommend ascii's bxspeak. ascii's app is more featureful (real
word?) and Via Voice does some cool stuff that festival doesn't. 

The newest version, dependencies, instructions, news, should be available 
at http://lowdrag.org/irc2fest/ .

basic instructions:
1) Get festival running in server mode (this is the hard part), I use the file
included in this tarball "festserv" in my "~/.bx2fest" directory and start
festival thusly: ' festival --server ~/.bx2fest/festserv & ' this makes
festival listen on the localhost, salt to taste to run festival on another
machine.
festival is available at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ .

2) install the Perl module "Festival::Client".
Festival Clients a CPAN module.

3) install the Perl module "Local::Irclog::Bitchx".
Available at http://lowdrag.org/irc2fest/ .

4) make ~/IrcLog a named pipe, move your old IrcLog to IrcLog.real
	$ cd # you should be in your home directory
	$ mv IrcLog IrcLog.real
	$ mknod IrcLog p

5) make a "~/.bx2fest directory.
	$ mkdir .bx2fest
Populate it with the file "trans.def" from this tarball, and optionally
"festserv" (see step 1).

6) put "bx2fest" somewhere in your $PATH and execute it.

7) in BitchX "/set log on". enjoy. 

If no one is talking an unobtrusive way to test it is "/topic".

Oh, I forgot to mention that this only works with BitchX. I plan a version for
irssi, but I can't decide how this should really be done. I cobbled this
together to tide me over until I decided and have been using it for some time
now.  :)

BUGS
	Every great once in a while bx2fest dies on startup, but it happens seldom
enough that I just ignore it and restart.
