Text processing before TTS:
- dictionary.txt rewrites words and phrases (km/h, np., units). Rules compile
into one alternation applied in a single pass, so replacements never chain
and longest-literal wins. Case-sensitive, whole-word.
- A per-queue second dictionary, written by the GUI into the first video's job
folder and merged with the shared one (--dictionary-extra).
- ALL-CAPS blocks become Title Case rather than sentence case: lowercasing
destroyed proper nouns inside captions ("NASA - MARGO MADISON") and invited
the normalizer to "correct" the name. Paired clips in output/clips/all-caps
showed the TTS reads both casings the same.
normalizer/ — digits to spoken Polish, in its own venv because it needs
transformers>=5, which must not touch ComfyUI's pinned versions:
- Two backends. Plain integers go to num2words for the value and a general
Polish LLM for the case; times, dates, decimals and identifiers go to a 0.6B
fine-tune. Measured on 40 real subtitle lines, each is clearly better than
the other on its half. 74% of numbered blocks take the first leg.
- Guards on every answer: runaway length, repetition loops, invalid bytes,
leftover digits, a lost minus sign, a changed number, a lost word. A failure
falls back to num2words, which is nominative but never wrong about the value.
- ComfyUI is asked to unload before normalizing; a normalizer that does not fit
in VRAM is spilled to RAM silently at 5x the cost.
Backend lifecycle:
- ComfyUI is found by port through /proc, so a backend started by hand is
managed too. SIGTERM escalates to SIGKILL, and a suspended process is killed
outright since it never runs its handlers.
- A clip that kills the backend is retried three times, each with a different
seed (the aborts are seed-dependent, not text-dependent), then skipped and
reported so an overnight queue keeps moving.
- start_comfyui.sh execs python, so the script's PID is ComfyUI's.
- GUI gains ComfyUI and Queue dictionary buttons; quitting stops the backend.
--resume-from now reuses the job folder's tts_input.srt instead of reparsing
the subtitles, so block N still pairs with clip_NNNN.flac.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
8.0 KiB
Installation
Two things need to exist: the ComfyUI backend (large, isolated, GPU-bound) and the script (which needs nothing installed at all).
Automated install
install_comfyui.sh in the project root reproduces the exact working
environment. It is idempotent — safe to re-run, and it skips any step already
satisfied.
cd ~/Programy/lektor_ai
./install_comfyui.sh
Roughly 30–60 minutes, mostly downloading. Expect ~22 GB.
Options
| Flag | Effect |
|---|---|
| (none) | Pinned versions — ComfyUI 7cb784e0, suite v5.3.0. Recommended. |
--latest |
Newest ComfyUI and suite instead. You are on your own for breakage. |
--skip-model |
Skip the 8.7 GB download; it happens on first generation anyway. |
--lock FILE |
Restore an exact package set from a pip freeze lockfile. |
--help |
Usage summary. |
Changing where things go
CONDA_ROOT=/opt/miniforge3 COMFY_ROOT=/data/comfy ./install_comfyui.sh
| Variable | Default |
|---|---|
CONDA_ROOT |
~/miniforge3 |
COMFY_ROOT |
~/comfy-tts-app |
ENV_NAME |
comfy-tts |
COMFY_PORT |
8189 |
PYTHON_VERSION |
3.12 |
If you change COMFY_ROOT or COMFY_PORT, update the script constants too —
see Configuring the script.
Exact reproduction
comfyui-requirements.lock.txt pins all 232 packages. To rebuild a
byte-identical environment:
./install_comfyui.sh --lock comfyui-requirements.lock.txt
Regenerate it after intentional changes:
source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh && conda activate comfy-tts
pip freeze > comfyui-requirements.lock.txt
What the installer does
Useful to know when something fails midway, since each step can be repeated on its own.
- Preflight — checks Linux, git, a downloader, GPU, disk space, ffmpeg. Only missing git or a downloader is fatal; the rest warn.
- Miniforge →
~/miniforge3, batch mode.conda initis deliberately not run, so your.bashrcis never touched. - Conda env
comfy-ttswith Python 3.12, then a guard that refuses to continue if the wrong Python somehow ended up active. - PyTorch from the cu128 index, pinned to 2.11.0.
- ComfyUI cloned and checked out at the pinned commit (detached HEAD — this
is expected, not an error), then its
requirements.txtinstalled. - TTS-Audio-Suite cloned, checked out at
v5.3.0, thenpython install.py— its own resolver, which must not be replaced with a plain pip install (see requirements.md). - Model —
bosonai/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4bintoComfyUI/models/TTS/higgs_audio_v3/. - Launcher written to
$COMFY_ROOT/start_comfyui.sh. - Verification — imports torch, torchaudio, transformers, safetensors, soundfile, librosa and reports CUDA availability.
Manual install
The equivalent by hand, if you would rather not use the script:
# Miniforge, self-contained, no shell integration
wget https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh -b -p ~/miniforge3
source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
conda create -n comfy-tts python=3.12 -y
conda activate comfy-tts
# PyTorch with the CUDA 12.8 runtime bundled
pip install torch==2.11.0 torchvision==0.26.0 torchaudio==2.11.0 \
--index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128
# ComfyUI, pinned
mkdir -p ~/comfy-tts-app && cd ~/comfy-tts-app
git clone https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI.git
cd ComfyUI && git checkout 7cb784e0f48784bb6ed588912e186e5ee1e9ee68
pip install -r requirements.txt
# The TTS node, pinned — note install.py, NOT requirements.txt
cd custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/diodiogod/TTS-Audio-Suite.git
cd TTS-Audio-Suite && git checkout tags/v5.3.0
python install.py
The model downloads itself on first generation. To fetch it ahead of time:
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
snapshot_download(
repo_id="bosonai/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b",
local_dir="~/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/models/TTS/higgs_audio_v3/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b",
)
Running the backend
~/comfy-tts-app/start_comfyui.sh
which is just:
#!/bin/bash
source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
conda activate comfy-tts
cd ~/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI && python main.py --port 8189
Leave it running in its own terminal for the whole session — model load takes tens of seconds and would otherwise be repeated. The web UI at http://127.0.0.1:8189 is useful for watching progress and reading errors, but is not needed; the script drives everything over HTTP.
Configuring the script
Most settings live in settings.ini next to the script — see
usage.md. The backend address in particular:
[comfy]
comfy_url = http://127.0.0.1:8189
Two paths remain constants in lektor_ai_comfy.py, because the script touches
ComfyUI's own directories directly rather than over HTTP:
COMFY_OUTPUT_DIR = Path("/home/lukas/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/output")
COMFY_INPUT_DIR = Path("/home/lukas/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/input")
Generated audio is read straight out of the output directory and voice
references are copied into the input directory, so both must be real paths
reachable from wherever the script runs. If you installed ComfyUI anywhere
other than ~/comfy-tts-app, edit these two lines. They are also what would
have to change first to drive a ComfyUI instance on another machine.
A third path, VOICE_PROMPTS_DIR, resolves to voices/ beside the script and
needs no editing as long as the project stays intact.
The script itself needs no installation. Ensure ffmpeg is present:
ffmpeg -version && ffprobe -version
If missing, and you would rather not use sudo:
conda install -n comfy-tts -c conda-forge ffmpeg
Note that this puts ffmpeg inside the conda env, so the script must then be run with that env active.
Number normalizer (optional, recommended)
Digits reach the TTS as words rather than figures, in the correct Polish case.
It has its own venv on purpose — the model needs transformers >= 5, which must
not be forced on the ComfyUI environment installed above.
cd ~/Programy/lektor_ai
normalizer/setup.sh # venv + torch (cu128) + transformers
HF_TOKEN=hf_... normalizer/setup.sh --model # the weights, ~1.1 GB
The weights are gated: accept the terms at https://huggingface.co/Folx/qwen3-0.6b-pl-text-normalization while signed in, then take a token from https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens. This is the only step that touches the network; runs are offline afterwards.
Skipping this is fine — the pipeline falls back to num2words (nominative case
only) and says so. Turn the whole stage off with numbers = no under
[normalize] in settings.ini. See normalizer/README.md.
Verifying
# 1. Backend responds
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8189/system_stats | head -c 200
# 2. GPU visible to PyTorch
source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh && conda activate comfy-tts
python -c "import torch; print(torch.__version__, torch.cuda.is_available())"
# -> 2.11.0+cu128 True
# 3. Model present
ls -la ~/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/models/TTS/higgs_audio_v3/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b/model.safetensors
# 4. Number normalizer, if installed
normalizer/venv/bin/python normalizer/normalizer.py --status
# -> "mode": "model" ("fallback" means the weights are missing)
# 5. End-to-end on 60 seconds of a real file
cd ~/Programy/lektor_ai
python3 lektor_ai_comfy.py "input/film.mkv" --embedded-subs --end 01:00
The short run is the real test — it exercises subtitle parsing, TTS, assembly and muxing, and finishes in a couple of minutes.
Uninstalling
Nothing was installed system-wide, so removal is just deleting directories:
conda env remove -n comfy-tts
rm -rf ~/comfy-tts-app
rm -rf ~/Programy/lektor_ai/normalizer/venv # number normalizer env
rm -rf ~/Programy/lektor_ai/normalizer/model # and its weights
rm -rf ~/miniforge3 # only if nothing else uses it