Re: [orca-list] Orca, gnome-speech and pulseaudio

[Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com>]

Hi
If portaudio has been compiled to utilize ALSA directly, rather than  
the OSS API as it did before, or if espeak has had this done, then the  
wrapper script will not work. Padsp wraps any OSS application, which  
espeak was, and causes it to work with Pulseaudio. This does not work  
if the application uses ALSA directly. If it uses the default card  
specified by ALSA rather than specifying a card, you may still be able  
to get it to work. Try this in a console, logged in as your user  
account:
asoundconf set-pulseaudio
Then log out and back into GNOME, or restart the GNOME speech driver  
at a very minimum. This sets ALSA's default card to go through  
Pulseaudio, as long as an application references the default card  
rather than a specific card, this should force it to go through Pulse.  
If this works, you can remove the wrapper script entirely, as it's not  
needed.
Let me know if that works for you. I'm not having any speech- 
dispatcher issues, but I'm not on a dual-core 64-bit system either,  
I'm in a virtual machine on my Macbook which, while it is a dual-core  
64-bit system in itself, I've not allocated all those resources to  
VMware.. I do remember those issues with smp in speech dispatcher,  
though I thought they were fixed. You could try the latest CVS of  
speech-dispatcher, perhaps that would help.



On Feb 25, 2009, at 21:57, Lorenzo Taylor wrote:

> Wow. I meant to send my reply to Luke's message to the list rather  
> than privately to Luke. If you could, please forward it back to the  
> list.
>
> Jacob,
> I tried creating the wrapper script you gave me, which I no longer  
> had, as it looks to have been removed. I logged out of Gnome and  
> back in, but gnome-speech is still bypassing pulseaudio for some  
> reason. I could tell from the script that it should work, but it  
> doesn't.
>
> As for using speech-dispatcher, I tried that, and would in fact  
> prefer using it, but I had to create a script to kill it, restart it  
> and restart Orca, because for some reason, unless this has changed  
> in Jaunty, speech-dispatcher seems to die at frequent and quite  
> random times. I don't know if it's the dual-core bug I thought was  
> fixed a long time ago reasserting itself or if it's something else  
> entirely involving the ESpeak module, but I just found it to be  
> unusable because of this. I didn't report the problem because I had  
> suspected it was a known bug that was in the process of being fixed,  
> but I seem to be one of very few if any people who still has this  
> problem, since I have seen no list traffic regarding this problem,  
> and I was able to use gnome-speech, so I did. Note that I am using a  
> 64-bit dual-core processor, and I use the 64-bit Ubuntu, so this may  
> put me in an unusual position to find bugs. I will try to do better  
> at reporting bugs as I find them.
>
> Thanks,
> Lorenzo
> --
> Great Goddess Isis,
> Thou who art above the stars,
> Grant us peace and love.
> --Lorenzo Taylor
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