speech-dispatcher rate and volume settings for espeak 1.25

[Hynek Hanke]

On Sun, 2007-06-03 at 15:33 -0500, William Hubbs wrote:
> If I type:
> espeak "This is a test."
> then
> spd-say "This is a test."
> the second time is much louder than the first, and should not be since
> the default volume is supposed to be the same.
>  Sun Jun  3 15:21:25 2007 [765657]: child: synth command = |echo "This is a test." | espeak -w /tmp/espeak.wav -v en -s 160 -a 200 -p 50 --stdin && aplay /tmp/espeak.wav|
>  Notice the "-a 200" on the espeak command line above.
>  Speech-dispatcher is setting the espeak volume to maximum, which is not
>  what I would expect with those settings.

I think your eSpeak settings are correct. Please, what is the
DefaultVolume setting in your speechd.conf? I´d expect it is 100 (max),
which explains your situation (100 gets mapped to 200).

It is not unreasonable to have maximum volume set by default in
speechd.conf. Since we miss a proper audio system on GNU/Linux,
with the simple audio output through ALSA in Speech Dispatcher, setting
DefaultVolume to 0 would mean that for most speech synthesizers
the default volume will be very quiet by default comparing to the rest
of your system :( So there is this setting to 100 so that users
don´t have a problem right from the start. You can allways change it
to what you like.

I´ll change the default espeak-generic.conf parameters for the new
eSpeak range in the next version of speechd.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke