[orca-list] Orca, speech-dispatcher and multi-channel sound!

["Anthony Sales" <tony sales rncb ac uk>]

I have finally gotten speech-dispatcher to work with Orca without losing the
multi-channel sound capabilities and thought I should post this short
explanation/guide because there have been several people having the same
problem on this list over the past few months. The final piece of the jigsaw
puzzle fell into place when I was experimenting with Debian Lenny and managed
to get speech-dispatcher working properly. I realised that I hadn't been
doing anything wrong at all but I hadn't really understood the difference
between speech-dispatcher running in user mode and as a system service. What
caused this was an error which seems to have crept into spd-conf and my
failure to understand the difference bwteen the two modes. For some reason
the spd-conf supplied in the Ubuntu 8.10 repositories set the syntheziser
port to 6561 for user mode and 6560 for running as a service, and it should
be the other way around. Because I didn't understand the difference between
the two modes I had been setting up speech-dispatcher in user mode but then
using init.d to start it as a service instead of using the speech-dispatcher
-d command. Given these two school boy errors I was never going to get it to
work! So for anyone who wants to try this at home here is a step by step
guide to getting speech-dispatcher working on Ubuntu 8.10 with multi-channel
sound support.

1. Run 'sudo apt-get install speech-dispatcher python-speechd' in a terminal

2. Once installed run 'spd-conf' in the same terminal.

3. Accept all of the default options except type 'pulse' for the sound server
and '6560' for the synthesizer port.

4. Speech-dispatcher should then speak if everything is going to plan!

5. Use the 'speech-dispatcher -d' command to start up speech-dispatcher as a
daemon'

6. Open the Orca preferences window and select speech-dispatcher as the
speech synthesizer and click apply.

7. Orca should now be a lot more snappy and responsive.

8. Finally open the Session Manager from the preferences menu, create a new
entry called speech-dispatcher and type 'speech-dispatcher -d' as the
command, then reboot and enjoy you new snappier speech!

9. If you want to use espeak with YASR, you can then edit the
/etc/yasr/yasr.conf file by commenting out the default Eflite synthesizer and
uncomment the speech-dispatcher  and corresponding synthesizer port entries.

Enjoy,

drbongo