ORCA Through A USB Device?

Lukas Loehrer listaddr1 at gmx.net
Sun Apr 29 11:13:00 BST 2007


Joanmarie Diggs writes ("Re: ORCA Through A USB Device?"):
> > So can Orca output to a USB device?
> 
> I've never tried this as I do not have such a device.  Sorry!  However,
> the question I assume is really how does one get gnome-speech to use an
> alternative device?  Hopefully someone here knows the answer.

As far as I know, gnome-speech does not do any audio playback itself,
but relies on the tts engines to do so themselves. Thus, one would
have to find out how to make for example espeak  use a different audio
device. 

In Feisty espeak uses portaudio 18 wich in turn uses OSS to play
audio. From a quick glance at the portaudio and espeak source, it
seems they will always default to /dev/dsp, if it is available. so,
one would probably have to recompile espeak to make it use another
device than the one offered by portaudio as the default, for example
/dev/dsp1.

Another way of course is to somehow get the USB device to be /dev/dsp.
Maybe unloading the modules for both sound devices and then reloading
only the module for the USB device might do the trick. Do "lsmod" to
see which modules are loaded, The modules for the sound cards start
with "snd_".

Moreover, speech-dispatcher offers options in its config files to choose the audio
output device to use.

Best regards, Lukas



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