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Re: [orca-list] Revamped explanation of problems relating to lack of speech accessability

Did that.  I recompiled espeak to use pulse by editing the makefile
accordingly.  Still had issues.  That did wonders for Emacspeak, for
instance.  It still gave me pure golden silence the minute I logged into
Gnome though.  That's not portaudio.  That's pure pulse.  Clever solution I
read some people were doing was logging into console with a different user
name.  By then, I was already using pulse-free Debian and didn't need to do
that but, it reinforces my point that you have to jump through a bunch of
hoops to get Pulse to do the sort of things I need it to do.  Those hoops
are nonexistent with it out of the equation.

Alex M




-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of
Christopher Chaltain
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 9:27 AM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Revamped explanation of problems relating to lack
of speech accessability

I had some of the problems you described in the console prior to the release
of vinux 4, and I was able to resolve them by recompiling eSpeak to use
PulseAudio instead of PortAudio when PulseAudio is installed. 
It's true I had to recompile eSpeak to fix the issues with lag and dropping
syllables, but the fact that I did it by taking PortAudio out of the
equation tells me that PulseAudio shouldn't be blamed for this behavior. I
believe this is how eSpeak is built for Vinux 4 now, i.e. 
using the runtime option instead of PortAudio, which is why these problems
don't exist in Vinux 4 using PulseAudio.

On 08/06/2013 09:20 AM, Alex Midence wrote:

Yeah, there's a lot of fancy multimedia stuff you can't do as nicely 
without Pulse.  I don't use those features though so, I don't miss it.  
My overarching concern is that speech output work responsively, 
reliably and unceasingly.  When I used pulse, the only time it ever 
worked decently well with console, gnome and emacspeak which are the 
three solutions I use was in Vinux 3.0  with the systemwide setup Bill 
Cox came up with for that version of Vinux.  In 3.1, there was 
crackling and other issues.  In 3.2, it really started doing badly for 
me especially in Emacspeak.  I used Natty (Ubuntu
12.04) also at the time and, as long as I didn't have Gnome logged in, 
it worked ok but once I logged onto Gnome, I could forget about 
console speech and Emacspeak would start clipping off the end of 
syllables and just lagging sometimes.  I had the same issues with 
Ubuntu 12.10.  Great speech in Gnome, poor speech performance in the 
console.  About this time, I switched from Vinux to Debian.  I worked 
out how to eliminate Pulse from the equation during initial installation

and all of my stuff just worked way way better.

I never lose speech in the conlsole when Gnome comes up.  My Emacspeak 
works as intended.  Gnome works great also.  Perhaps, the multimedia 
stuff wouldn't but I just don't do a whole lot of multimedia-related 
work in Linux.  I do listen to podcasts and some music from time to 
time and it works good.  If I want to turn it down, I reach over and 
fiddle with the volume knob on my speakers and that's that.

Having said all of that, the fact that you guys got console speech 
working with Pulse in a secure way gives me hope that it will make it 
upstream and other distros like Debian and Fedora as well as plain old 
Ubuntu will benefit from it as well.


Regards,
Alex M

-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Luke 
Yelavich
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 12:22 AM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Revamped explanation of problems relating to 
lack of speech accessability

On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 01:21:24PM EST, Christopher Chaltain wrote:

I used two different methods to get Speakup and Orca cohabitating 
with PulseAudio's user mode in Ubuntu and Vinux before Luke provided 
his ConsoleKit package. One method was just to log into a console as 
root and then su to my user ID. Another was to run sudo speechd-up in 
a terminal on the desktop and then log into my user ID in a console. 
I don't consider either method to be extremely difficult.
Your first statement also made it seem like it was not possible as 
opposed to just difficult.

I've only used PulseAudio systems in the last few years, and I 
haven't found it that complicated. I don't have experience with a 
pure alsa system to compare it to though, so you may be right in that 
I don't know what I'm missing. From the posts I've seen, which I 
haven't read too deeply, it seems like it takes a bit of work to 
install a system without PA on it though.

I'm curious, on a pure alsa system, can I control the volume of each 
audio stream like I can with my Ubuntu systems where I have PA 
running?


No. Its also harder to do the following:
* Use bluetooth audio hardware.
* Move an application's audio output from one card to another.
* Make an app play through a different card, although if the app 
provides UI to do this, then its not so bad.

The resampling algorithm that ALSA's dmix plugin uses is also nowhere 
nearly as good a quality as the resamplers that pulseaudio can work 
with. I say resamplers because pulseaudio can work with several, and 
this is changeable in its configuration files. Pulseaudio also does as 
much as it can to minimize power usage when audio is being played back.

Luke
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp

_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at 
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp



--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to
help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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