Re: [orca-list] Fw: Playing multiple sounds?

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

Actually, I've seen this behavior as well, I think.

What I want to do is continue using pulse, but just have 
speech-dispatcher using alsa. I don't understand why this shouldn't be 
possible, since every indication seems to be that both of these 
technologies should be able to do full duplex, but this doesn't seem to 
be the case. If I kill and restart speech-dispatcher with it configured 
for alsa, I get silence. If I configure for pulse, it works just fine. 
Since pulseaudio is the future of Ubuntu at least, I'd really like to 
not have to modify my system substantially to step off the golden path 
for accessibility, especially since IIRC newer versions of pulse have 
apparently made improvements that let it be run system-wide instead of 
just from the X session (and, I hope, might be able to take on 
privileges and run in a lower-latency mode.)

I've configured for alsa and generated some log files here. You'll find 
a copy of my ~/.speech-dispatcher directory with all relevant configs 
and logs:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/147071/speech-dispatcher.zip

Any thoughts as to what might be happening here? Seems like we're 
encountering the same issue, and it'd be great if all folks had to do is 
copy over the stock speech-dispatcher configs and could use SD 
configured to use alsa alongside pulseaudio.


On 01/04/2009 11:50 AM, Tomas Cerha wrote:
> Hello Anthony,
>
> playing multiple sounds with ALSA and SD should not be a problem.  ALSA
> uses DMIX for software mixing so even with single channel sound cards,
> Speech Dispatcher should share the audio device with other applications.
>
> If it doesn't work, the problem may be either in Speech Dispatcher not
> really using ALSA output or your ALSA setup not supporting DMIX.
>
> See also
> http://alsa.opensrc.org/home/w/org/opensrc/alsa/index.php?title=DmixPlugin
>
> Best regards, Tomas
>
>