Re: [orca-list] linux sound issues Re: Opensolaris Vs. Ubuntu

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

I agree that gnome-speech is not an ideal solution for some of the 
reasons that Halim lists.  It does, however, tend to work and requires 
little effort on the part of the end user to get it going.

I would certainly welcome a replacement for gnome-speech that meets 
user requirements, is reliable, is performant, works with the majority 
of speech synthesis solutions available today, works on the major 
operating system distributions, and has a collaboration-oriented team 
that is willing to support it.  SpeechDispatcher definitely has some of 
these characteristics and it's nice to see people trying it out.  It 
seems to be close.

To take this forward, a great way for your vote to count in the open 
source world is to do development and become part of the solution.  If 
you want SpeechDispatcher to be *the* solution, you need to make it 
happen.  Contribute.  Port it to various platforms.  Work on the 
stability.  Work on the ease of configuration.  Work on more complex 
problems, such as terminal-based systems like the SunRay.  Take the 
great ideas that are on paper and realize them in good code.  You will 
become a hero and people will forever speak your name in great 
reverence.

Will

On Nov 13, 2008, at 6:34 AM, Halim Sahin wrote:

> Hello,
> The mentioned audio problem in linux does only ixist because no 
> configuration
> was made to reflect accessibility needs.
>
> I think I have written this about 20 times in this list:
>
> Opensound drivers were not free which was the reason for creating
> alsa.
> OSS had no softmixing features at this time!!!
> Currently a user can play and enjoy his favourite song together with 
> speech
> output.
> This needs complex configuration because no distribution does a usefull
> one at this point.
>
> Currently the biggest problem is gnomespeech.
> Orca uses as default gnomespeech to provide speech.
> This is not a good solution because
> 1. It depends on gnome but we want to use the
> textconsole as well
> 2. it doesn't handle soundoutput itself.
> All synths must implement their own output methods
> This is really bad for endusers.
> They want use viavoice wich is (outdated).
> It uses oss as default and BTW. does it run under opensolaris?
> To use oss apps with orca we have two things.
> 1. use direct oss compat layer  output e. G. through /dev/dsp (wich is 
> the bad
> solution).
>
> 2. Use aoss wrapper wich is should be prefered because of softmixing!!!
>
> The best solution for all problems is Speech-dispatcher.
> It has native alsa output and works great for me on all my machines
>
> my drivers are:
> snd-hda-intel, snd-emu10k1, snd-intel8x0 snd-via17xxx, snd-usb-audio.
> speech-dispatcher plays the speechoutput and doesn't relay on 
> synthesis output stuff.
>
> I am voting for
> 1. using speech-dispatcher as default speech system under orca.
> 2. Distributions shouldn't try to route sound of speechsystems through 
> soundservers like
> pulseaudio!!!
> Regards
> Halim
>
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