Re: [orca-list] Help needed for system-wide pulseaudio for blind users

[Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com>]

That only helps if ALSA does a good job with your card. A lot of new cards have absolutely facility for 
in-hardware mixing and resampling and Dmix does a poor job at best on these cards, resulting in a lot of 
clicking and popping every time speech starts.
Question for Bill: Did you recompile espeak to use Pulseaudio instead of Portaudio? You can edit the Makefile 
or supply on the make command line:
AUDIO=pulseaudio
To both the make and make install commands. This is of no importance for speech dispatcher but vitally 
important for espeakup, since espeakup simply has espeak output the text with the audio method that is built 
into it. Portaudio will use ALSA and I've seen portaudio cause some issues with Pulse device sharing. Note 
that you may only have one audio output method built into espeak, at least for now.



On Jan 4, 2010, at 12:29, Pia wrote:

> I don't know if this is of any help, but I reverted my Karmic install to using ALSA instead of Pulse Audio 
> and then could get Speak Up to run just fine with other audio streams such as mp3 files.  I did this last 
> night and so have not played with getting Orca up and running yet, but on a past Jaunty system I had, I 
> remember that Orca didn't work either until I uninstalled pulseaudio and disabled it as well.  We shall see 
> how hard it is to get Orca working with ALSA in Karmic.  I get the idea that your whole point though is to 
> get speech to play correctly with Pulse Audio though instead of removing PA and using ALSA.  Am I correct?  
> Would the ALSA work around be a satisfactory solution for you?  I ask because it seems to be what has 
> worked best for me on the systems I have tried to get talking recently.  That being said, there are plenty 
> of things I have not played with yet, such as Lucid itself.
>
> HTH,
>
> Pia
>
> On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, Bill Cox wrote:
>
> > I also posted this on the pulseaudio list, but there may be more help
> > to be found here...
> >
> > I'm trying to build a Vinux (blind-user Linux distro) release based on
> > Ubuntu/Lucid.  There's too much code to rewrite to have everything
> > working the "right" way with pulseaudio by May, so I want to release
> > Vinux/Ubuntu Lucid with the system-wide hack.
> >
> > I've enabled PA to start in system wide mode by editing
> > /etc/defaults/pulseaudio, and enabling it there.  I've added gdm,
> > root, speech-dispatcher, and my user name to the pulse-access group.
> > Pulseaudio starts, and speech-dispatcher and speechd-up work with it
> > just fine at boot.  Since this is a distro for the blind, I boot into
> > a console, not gdm.  The login prompt is read nicely, as is text when
> > I log in.  However, if I try to play a .wav file, there is no sound.
> > None of the apps with PA back-ends will play sound for me.  When I
> > type 'startx', Gome comes up, but the sound preference dialog tells me
> > there's no sound card.  I suspect that rights to use it have been
> > granted to the speech-dispatcher user, and I'm not able to access it.
> >
> > If there is anyone who can help me get such a settup working, I'd
> > really appreciate it!
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Bill
> >
> > -- 
> > Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list
> > Ubuntu-accessibility lists ubuntu com
> > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
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