Re: [orca-list] Pulse audio on Arch Linux?

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

I have to be honest that I have never found a need for pulseaudio and I 
haven't really seen a configuration which would work well for me. As for 
improving the responsiveness of the audio, could it do that as it still 
uses the same sound drivers? May be it accesses ALSA more efficiently 
than some applications would, but then you have the extra layer for 
audio to be processed through.

The one system I have tried on ArchLinux when I have had issue with ALSA 
(NOTE: pulseaudio couldn't solve the issue as it doesn't change the 
actual driver and it was to do with interacting with the hardware) was 
OSS4. Once you get OSS4 configured correctly it seems to work well but 
you do have the issue that most applications on linux are compiled by 
default for ALSA. Also note that I refer to OSS4, an earlier version of 
OSS was previously included in the kernel but that did suffer some 
issues but OSS4 seems to have solved them.

To use OSS4 I have found that the output for espeak doesn't work well 
with it, a solution is to use speech-dispatcher (find it in AUR). If you 
really don't want to use speech-dispatcher then I think festival may 
work fine but I haven't really tested it (ViaVoice/voxin/ttsynth while 
working with OSS4 to initial impressions, I later found was clipping a 
bit from the end of the audio, that's for a debian system).

The one thing I am uncertain of is whether you will loose speech if only 
using software speech output. I used speakup with an apollo synth and a 
Braille display to play it safe. If you don't have access to either of 
those pieces of hardware then SSH from another computer might be an option.

There is a page on the Arch wiki http://wiki.archlinux.org which 
discusses installing OSS4 and configuring the system. Sorry for no 
direct link, go to table of contents, sound and then opensound system (I 
think that is what its called, it may be OSS or OSS4).

Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Cleverson Casarin Uliana wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Have someone replaced alsa with pulse audio on Arch Linux? Is it worth 
> trying? Some say it enhanses the system performance especially in Gnome.
>
> Thanks,
> Cleverson