Re: [orca-list] Orca, Gnome Speech extreme latency, stalling

[Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com>]

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You're right; new comers shouldn't have to jump through hoops of
installing development libraries, compiling, etc. just to have
accessibility.  Ubuntu and similar distros have prided themselves in
making linux easier for the masses to use - reducing the "Geek factor"
so often associated with linux.

Actually, when I brought gnome up in Debian, The only thing I had to
do without any accessibility was login to gnome through the GDM the
first time and pressing insert-f2 to launch Orca by hand.  Orca came
up talking with festival speech automatically and I was able to
configure it; actually, the setup sequence is what popped up for me
that first time.  After selecting espeak through gnome-speech, Orca
spoke fine and I never experienced any latency.

One wierd observation however was while configuring Orca for the first
time, I had both synths going at the same time until I restarted
Orca.  That was really strange.  I want to experiment with Cepstral
voices but I can't find the gnome-swift or python-swift package
anyware.  I may have to rebuild gnome-speech myself.  This is where
the packaging strategy buggs me a bit.  People tend to discourage you
from mixing and matching pre built packages and compilations from
source but then if a package doesn't exist or can't be found or isn't
current, then it is necessary to do just that.  

On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 06:24:16PM -0600, Stephen Clower wrote:
> Steve,
>
> Yes; Espeak going direct to oss works much better than using the  
> PulseAudio sound server that Ubuntu uses by default. However, to get  
> there, I had to install the Gnome development tools, checkout  
> Gnome-speech from SVN, and rebuild the whole thing. I'm quite  
> experienced in this arena, and I wasn't phased by the work needed to get  
> this to work. I'm concerned that in the case of Ubuntu, at least, the  
> average user won't have a clue on what to do, where to go, etc. Did you  
> experience the same latency in Lenny as many of us have in Ubuntu?
>
> Regards,
> Steve
>
>
> Steve Holmes wrote:
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>> Steve, I just did a recent full install of Debian Lenny Testing; I
>> chose gnome-speech because its punctuation and capitalization works
>> verry well with espeak.  So I use gnome-speech plus espeak.  I believe
>> gnome-speech uses OSS - wish it were ALSA.  In any case, I find the
>> general performance to be pretty good.  I thought someone said there
>> was a way to get gnome-speech to use ALSA but I forget how.  It might
>> have more to do with espeak.  I might have to recompile espeak
>> manually to change its choice of speech systems.  From what I can
>> tell, there isn't any way to externally tell espeak to use ALSA in
>> Debian.
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 02:58:08PM -0500, Willie Walker wrote:
>>   
>>> Hi Steve:
>>>
>>> The sound support on OpenSolaris seems to do pretty well and it also  
>>> provides audio mixing.  There's an old-ish page here on the OSS 
>>> stuff:  http://opensolaris.org/os/project/opensound/.
>>>
>>> Will
>>>
>>> Stephen Clower wrote:
>>>     
>>>> Willie Walker wrote:
>>>>       
>>>>> Hey Steve:
>>>>>
>>>>> We use OSS on Solaris.  NOTE that you are entering a very 
>>>>> politically charged space.  Linux audio is traditionally very 
>>>>> broken and everyone and their brother has an idea for how to fix 
>>>>> it.  Unfortunately, there are more solutions than problems, but 
>>>>> it's a close race since each solution introduces its own set of 
>>>>> problems.  :-(
>>>>>         
>>>> Will,
>>>> Political arguments aside, have you found the oss implementation to 
>>>> be  the least latent audio system? I assume that it still can only 
>>>> handle  one audio stream at a time and cannot deal with 
>>>> multichannel sound?
>>>>
>>>> Best regards,
>>>> Steve
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Orca-list mailing list
>>>> Orca-list gnome org
>>>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
>>>> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
>>>>       
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Orca-list mailing list
>>> Orca-list gnome org
>>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
>>> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
>>>     
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>> _______________________________________________
>> Orca-list mailing list
>> Orca-list gnome org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
>> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
>>   
>

> _______________________________________________
> Orca-list mailing list
> Orca-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
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