suggestion: compiling espeak to use alsa

[Luke Yelavich]

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On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 04:37:13PM EST, Sérgio Neves wrote:
> Hi,
> I'd like to give a suggestion to the next versions of ubuntu, if people 
> agree.
> I believe people have already thought on this, but I think it has never been 
> discussed on this list.
> Is it possible to add portaudio19 on the distribution and compile espeak 
> with alsa support? I think that until speech-dispatcher could be integrated, 
> it's a temporary good solution.

For many a release, I have tried to do just that, however PortAudio v19 is giving a lot more problems than it should solve. Recent PortAudio snapshots work well, however there are reportedly problems with PortAudio v19 via alsa, having problems when working alongside PulseAudio, which Ubuntu Hardy will use as the desktop sound system.

I intend to do some testing over the coming days with this option, as well as wrapping espeak using PortAudio v18 in the padsp utility, which makes use of PulseAudio directly. I would prefer this solution, as it then allows direct integration with PulseAudio, leaving PulseAudio itself to talk to Alsa.

> Three days ago, I'm working with espeak compiled with alsa, using 
> gnome-speech, and orca has never crashed until now and I think it's almost 
> as fast as using speech-dispatcher.

I sincerely hope to use speech-dispatcher in the next release of Ubuntu, after hardy, as I believe it is the way to go long term for speech output, especially since KDE will be coming on board with accessibility support.

Thanks for raising this publically. As I've said, this has always been something I have wanted to fix, and finally, this release just may be the one where it does happen.
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Luke Yelavich
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