Appreciate the comments, thanks. GEM may be being replaced by OFELIA...? I'll use extended as a good starting point though to identify what I should be using. The time you save knowing just a few key facts...I think some kind of "Advanced Guide" or extra chapters in the existing guides might go a long way. Anyway, I managed to make moocow's flite make some noise. Did see some errors to do with garray and 64bit but I'll have to take a bit of time later to look at that. Elsewhere, I am also learning to build the flite external...

How cool is that, it was in Moocow all along (which I didn't have), I never knew. Thx!!

( Wondering, how does anyone find the time to go through all the externals and understand when and where to use them? When is the ultimate PD manual coming, that explains which libraries are must-haves and why....? )

Not on macOS by any chance?

@youaresound Meaning this is an alternative or replacement? Currently trying to get it running... It's not as full-featured as ratts appears to have been, but that could change of course.

So even the update is two years old

Has anybody used the ratts library since then? How do you compile it (on macOS)...I'm a dev but not in this tech stack...any ideas?

(Or, for that matter, any other speech synths for pd would be interesting...haven't found any yet).

Crikey, I'm so late to the party it's ridiculous! :/ I only discovered DIY2 a few months ago, but even 10 years after it was born, I'm loving it. Is it something you might consider open sourcing as a repo, mod? I know that there a plenty of users out there that build on DIY2 so why not combine the efforts? I'll bet that a bunch of us have made the same kind of tweaks here and there too.