Re: [orca-list] orca and other sound

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Before I answer, a couple of questions.
Is your sound card a proper multi-channel card (hardware mixing) or does
it rely on software mixing? Just because you can have multiple sounds in
windows doesn't mean it is multi-channel in hardware, windows can do
software mixing.
Which synthesiser are you using and through what system? eg. espeak
through gnome-speech.

If everyone who wants to use speech on your system will be using the
same audio device for speech output, then I would suggest that you
install speech-dispatcher and use your synth through that. When you
install speech-dispatcher, you will need to install the python bindings
as well, but I am unsure what the package name would be for you. The
main speech-dispatcher configuration is done in a file
(/etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf), which is fairly well commented to
explain what each option is. If you use espeak, I suggest that you use
the espeak module, not the espeak-generic module in speech-dispatcher.

While this improves the situation, some apps don't use ALSA (which
speech-dispatcher uses, which allows software mixing), so for those you
will need to change their output system if possible or use the aoss
script if they have no way to support ALSA.

There is a way to use aoss with gnome-speech, but I found that solution
more complicated and less satisfactory to use, although should it be
necessary that you use gnome-speech then there is a way (discussed in
the past on this list).

From
Michael Whapples
On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 16:51 +0000, Michael Weaver wrote:
> I have a PC with multi channel sound card.
> I can use Windoweyes in Windows while playing sound but I haven't been
> able to play music etc in Ubuntu while Orca is running is there a way
> around this problem or will I have to wait until the next release of
> Ubuntu?