speech-dispatcher 0.6.4 issue

[Kerry Hoath]

It depends on what soundcard you have and whether or not the soundcard is 
using dmix.

dmix is the plugin for alsa that mixes output streams together,
and it is part of the alsa-lib package I think or the plugins package I 
can't remember which one to be honest.

It depends on which soundcard you are using as to how many hardware output 
channels you have; however dmix is supposed to mix in software to overcome 
this problem.

Make sure your libs, utils and driver are all 1.14rc something or later 
because they changed the way they handled the plugins in 1.0.13 or later I 
seem to recall.

None of this may help; and I haven't tried to use alsa with speech 
dispatcher.
the killer will be to test if 2 oss applications can run at the same time 
with alsa;
is it a multiple open problem on /dev/dsp or is it specific to speech 
dispatcher?
Shouldn't speech dispatcher be using alsa directly and if so; should this 
not free up /dev/dsp if dmix is in use?

We need to acertain if this is speech dispatcher's fault or simply a funny 
with alsa and its plugins even if it did work before.

No idea if any of the above helps; i've had a long day at work and i'm just 
thinking at my keyboard.

Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chuck Hallenbeck" <chuckh at ftml.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 7:35 PM
Subject: Re: speech-dispatcher 0.6.4 issue


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> Jan and Willem, thanks for your suggestions.
>
> And Jan, thanks for helping fix the speechd mailing list issue.
>
> The aoss solution does not work for me. At least not completely. The
> test Willem made using the play command was not conclusive, since as I
> think I reported earlier, the play command continues to work when other
> oss applications, such as swift, madplay, and flite, all fail.
>
> I used aoss followed by examples of swift, madplay, and flite, with and
> without speech-dispatcher running. Here is what I find:
>
> 1. madplay works as well with or without speech-dispatcher, so that
> seems to solve the issue for that application.
>
> 2. swift and flite sound unacceptably distorted when used with aoss,
> with or without speech-dispatcher running. So while aoss seems to solve
> the speech-dispatcher issue, it cannot be used due to this serious
> distortion.
>
> 3. Play works with or without aoss, with or without speech-dispatcher,
> and so is not a helpful application with which to test the problem.
>
> Finally, I have found that if I add only one module to
> speech-dispatcher, the espeak-generic module, all my applications work
> correctly and none of them require aoss.
>
> This behavior is new behavior for recent upgrades of speech-dispatcher
> on my system, but at the same time I have made so many other upgrades
> that I cannot say for sure where the problem lies. However, I do now
> have a solution: avoid adding the flite or festival modules when
> running speech-dispatcher.
>
> Chuck
>
> - -- 
> The Moon is Waning Crescent (35% of Full)
> My new web site location is at: http://hallenbeck.ftml.net
> College, that fountain of knowledge, where everyone goes to drink.
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