Re: Espeak Server Likes PulseAudio?

[Christopher Chaltain <chaltain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not sure if this will help or not, but following some advice I found 
on the web (I think from Tim.) I recompiled eSpeak from source to have 
it use PA if it was present. I'm sure you could do the opposite and 
force it to use ALSA. Here are the notes I wrote up for myself. I hope 
they help.

**** Recompiling eSpeak to Use PulseAudio

Unfortunately, the last syllable spoken is always truncated making it 
unusable.

I fixed this by downloading the source code for eSpeak and compiling it 
for runtime, which uses PulseAudio if it's running and PortAudio otherwise.

I went to http://espeak.sourceforge.net/download.html and downloaded the 
file espeak-1.46.02-source.zip.

I had to install the library development packages for PulseAudio and 
PortAudio.

$ sudo apt-get install libpulse-dev libportaudio-dev

Now after unpacking the source code for eSpeak, I went into the source 
directory, espeak-1.46.02-source/src, and I made the following changes 
to the Makefile:

#DATADIR=/usr/share/espeak-data
DATADIR=/home/chaltain/Tools/share/espeak-data

#PREFIX=/usr
PREFIX=/home/chaltain/Tools

# 'runtime' uses pulseaudio if it is running, else uses portaudio
AUDIO = runtime
#AUDIO = portaudio

Now I run the commands:

$ make all
$ make install

This creates new eSpeak libraries and binaries, using the runtime 
option, and places them in my ~/Tools directory.

Now to start Emacspeak with eSpeak and these new libraries, I run the 
commands:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/chaltain/Tools/lib
$ emacspeak -e

aNow Emacspeak comes up and I don't have the latency issues.

Note that I exported the variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH instead of running the 
following command:

$ sudo ldconfig /home/chaltain/Tools/lib

so that I'd only run emacspeak with this new library and not making the 
change globally, so as not to impact Orca if I did something wrong.

When using ldconfig, note you can use

$ ldconfig -p | grep espeak

to see which eSpeak library is being used.

On 03/28/2013 11:48 AM, Steve Holmes wrote:
> Somehow, it seems like every time I launch emacspeak now and when I
> test the espeak server from the emacspeak servers directory, it
> appears to be launching pulse audio on my system and that in turn is
> giving me all kinds of problems with speech losses and taking over my
> ALSA devices.  This all began recently when I thought I would give
> Pulse another look since I use gnome and want gnome sound support.
> But after running into conflicts with Speakup and ALSA, I decided to
> disable Pulse by commenting out the default.pa file but every time I
> start up emacspeak now, I get some broken or garbled speech and all
> ALSA speech such as from speakup is silent until I quit emacs.  Anyone
> know what could be going on here?
>
> I would love to just uninstall pulse entirely but other packages
> require the dumb thing so can't remove it.  Any way to get emacspeak's
> espeak server to use ALSA only and not be calling on pulseaudio?
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
> emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
> subject of "unsubscribe" or "help".

--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help".