espeakup and pulseaudio

[Steve Holmes]

The only reason I am even bothering to keep pulseaudio around is the
ability to control streams' volume independently of each other and I
seem to be getting more sound events to play now since I started using
pulse in gnome.  But I can't stand the fact that when I try to get
speech dispatcher to autosspawn properly when I startx, well that's
another matter and a very bad one at that.  I had much better luck
running speech dispatcher as a system-wide service with ALSA and then
just have Orca start up automatically when I startx gnome.  That
combination just seems to work better for me.  So, I'm about to change
speechd back to do just that.  I don't like the volume jumping all
over the place every time I restart gnome.

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 12:11:33PM -0800, David Csercsics wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 01:27:16PM -0500, Christopher Moore wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I'm running archand have the pulseaudio server running.
> > When I start espeakup with the rc.d script, the following message repeats
> > each time data is to be spoken:
> > wave_open_sound > Pa_OpenStream : err=-9996 (Invalid device)
> > 
> > So what is the invalid device?
> 
> Probably portaudio trying to open your sound card using alsa but
> pulseaudio has already grabbed the card and locked it open so you're
> getting that error. I don't know how you'd get espeakup to work with
> pulseaudio anyway since pulseaudio is typically started as a non-root user
> and espeakup typically needs to be run as root so you can have speech
> when you login for the first time. Espeakup would work with pulseaudio
> if you built espeak against pulseaudio instead of portaudio but then
> as I say I don't know how you're going to get speech in text consoles
> since espeakup is started as root and the pulseaudio process is not. Yes
> you can run pulseaudio in systemwide mode but if you do that the program
> usually disables shared memory and so doesn't run very efficiently. Unless
> they've changed some of this logic. It's been a long time since I messed
> with pulseaudio so I'm possibly wrong about some or all of this but if
> somebody wants to correct me then have at it. I'm not even sure how
> pulseaudio helps anything over the standard dmix plugins. It's looking
> like unnecessary complexity at this point but I'd be happy to try to
> help get this working if somebody can give me a reason why I should
> bother breaking a very nice sound setup.
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