espeak and pulseaudio

[Luke Yelavich]

On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:01:27PM EST, Tim Cross wrote:
> I now plan to get speech-dispatcher running. I have a few questions which I'm
> hoping others on this list can help clarify. 
> 
> 1. Given that ubuntu is moving to pulseAudio based configuration, why is
> espeak and libespeak still being built against portaudio rather than
> pulseaudio? Is this just to provide more flexibility an enable espeak to run
> on both pulseaudio and non-pulseaudio based setups or are there other issues
> with linking against pulseaudio that I'm unaware of and which might bite me
> further down the track? As it seems there are issues when running espeak built
> against portaudio under a pulseAudio configuraiton, is there justification for
> having two different packages, one built against portaudio and one built
> against pulse? 

Espeak is built against portaudio v19 because it allows the espeak command-line binary to be used without the need for pulseaudio. Yes I am aware that portaudio isn't helping, but its better than no espeak command-line binary working at all unless you run pulse.

Unfortunately its too late to address this for lucid, but I am seriously considering building two versions of espeak, one against portaudio, one against pulse, for lucid+1 and beyond. Ultimately I think espeak should move to a platform specific solution, i.e use the best liraries for individual platforms, but thats a lot more work.

> 2. I've seen some posts regarding patches to speech-dispatcher and other
> related work and was wondering if I'm better off running with the ubuntu
> Karmic packages, sources from the 'official' speech-dispatcher repository or
> some other source? (I seem to remember seeing a reference to a separate
> unofficial speech-dispatcher bzr repository on launchpad, but don't have a
> specific URI).

If you are going to use lucid in the future, I suggest you use lucid's speech-dispatcher packages, as they have had a significant rework, in terms of pulseaudio output, and should work much better than the packages in karmic.
> 
> 3. I've seen lots of reports of people having major issues with running
> pulseAudio. While I found numerous issues with getting it to work well on my
> system, it now seems to be working really well. Have I just been extremely
> lucky or are all the reports maily the result of pulseAudio being a little
> complex to get working well or are there real issues I'm not aware of? Are
> there issues with using pulseAudio and speech-dispatcher?

Pulseaudio has really pushed the boundaries in the last few years, exposing many bugs both in audio drivers, and in the userspace library layer. A lot of people have experienced teething problems, which are largely sorted now, except for a few corner cases with less common hardware. You shoudln't have any problems now,unless you are using hardware that has weird behavior, i.e Creative sound hardware, or pro audio sound cards.

Luke