Loading voices makes the GUI unresponsive

[easyaspi314]

Currently, due to microsoft/onnxruntime#27063 , the GIL will be locked while the TTS models are loaded. This causes the entire program to hang while loading voices (which is about 1-2 seconds). Not enough to be a "not responding", but it is still something I would like to avoid.

This issue doesn't exist on freethreaded builds.

Possible solutions:

1. Verify stability on freethreaded Python and make it the preferred version.

• piper_phonemize_fix has been updated to allow freethreading on Python 3.14t (but hasn't fully been tested)
• Needs thorough testing

2. Wait for onnxruntime to fix the issue.
3. Use multiprocessing (which will complicate the entire program)