DEC-talk server incredibly flaky

[<peter.rayner@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

T. V. Raman writes:
>
>But first check if the dectalk is using OSS emulation which is
>what I suspect it is doing.
Yes indeed.  And it may b a bit worse than this.  As I noted in my
first post about this new machine, sound was appearing at double
speed and double pitch under OSS.  ALSA fixed this.  Now I've found
out how from the nice documentation on OSS emulation  under ALSA.  
he sound device I'm using (an INTEL I82801 seems, from reading the
comments in the driver, to only support 16-bit *stereo* samples.
DEC-talk produces mono.  Thus the sound hardware expects twice as
many samples as it's getting, all consistent with the speed and
pitch.  
ALSA fixes this by inserting a "plugin" layer in its OSS emulation to
map what's being sent to the device file (/dev/dsp0) to what the
hardware likes to see.    One can test this by turning off the
plugin per application.  If you do this you get back to speech
sounding like a duck on speed.       
>
>Also, check if you have any .asoundrc file in your home directory
>that will also influence how your  personal alsa environment
>functions. 
No file there.  
>Finally, run some regression tests without emacspeak of the
>speech server --- send it some commands in a pipe and see what
>happens.
Standalone tests so far going fine.  Not clear evidence but most of
the hangs seem to happen when starting chunks of speech,
e.g. changing buffers and the like.  It doesn't seem to crash in the
middle of reading a window etc. 

I'll keep looking and reporting but others might want to be aware of
potential excitement with the combination of DEC--talk and the
I88201.  
cheers
Peter
-- 
Peter Rayner
LSCE - CEA de Saclay
Orme des Merisiers, 91191 Gif/Yvette
work: +33  (1) 69 08 88 11;	mobile: +33 (6) 75 46 56 52;	 fax: +33 (1) 69 08 77 16
mail-to: peter.rayner@xxxxxxxxxxx

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