speech-dispatcher and espeak

[Steve Holmes]

Yeah, I have pulse going now and it is working sort-of.  This brings
me to ask some questions so I can get a better handle on it and maybe
I can stablize the volumes from session to session.

1. How can you easily control the volume of streams in the console
environment? Like control mplayer's volume and perhaps
Speech-dispatcher.  Interestingly enough, espeakup and espeak seem to
be working OK since I installed the asound.conf file with suggested
pulse settings. It seems like at different invokations of
speech-dispatcher, the volume will change and then become all
distorted and stuff.

2. Right now, it seems easiest for me to control levels in gnome under
the system/preferences/sounds panel.  If I get those levels right, I
can get rid of the distortion and get speech dispatcher to sound
pretty decent. Are the volume settings within gnome shared with other
console applications? From what I've seen so far, I would say, yes.  I
just wonder if that is to be expected.

3. How are others dealing with Speakup, espeakup, and espeak with
Pulse? When I booted after setting up pulse, I did not have any speech
at the console login.  I got some error while rebooting without any
speech and after I hit the enter key, the boot finally finished and I
still didn't get speech right away.  I ssh'd into the machine from my
laptop and looked over some logs and saw some errors concerning
osspd.  I then went back over to my desktop machine and found it up
and talking so dunno for sure just when speech came up over there.

4. What order should the daemons be loaded that affect pulseaudio? So
far, I have alsa, osspd and well, of course espeak but that surely
should come after the others.

I hope I'm not too wild with these questions but I'm trying to get my
arms around this pulse stuff and keep it stable.  I'm presently
looking over the pulseaudio wiki but that is still a bit foggy right
now.

In case anyone is interested, the wiki can be found at
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki