Re: Emacspeak with eSpeak losing speech on Vinux 4

["Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm running espeak 1.47.05, which I built from source and which is
configured to use pulseaudio. The distro supplied versions of espeak
have never worked well for me. I always have to recompile and set to
use pulseaudio before espeak works well and does not chop off words
and crash every few lines. 

I'm running a totally default pulseaudio setup on both my systems (one
Linux Mint 14 and one Ubuntu 13.04). 

Both systems are using integrated intel audio cards. However, on a
previous system, using an Sound Blaster card (can't remember what it
was, but it had an unusually high input sample rate), I did have to
tweak the pulseaudio configuration to get reliable audio. In
particular, I had to set sample rate and some other settings. I worked
out what was needed by increasing the log level for pulseaudio and a
long test, tweak, restart, test cycle. However, this was quite a while
back with considerably older versions of pulseaudio and when there was
still some flux in how linux was dealing wiht real time scheduling,
shared memory and process limits. A lot of this seems to have settled
down in the last couple of years, so I'm not sure how much of this is
still relevant. For me, the default out of the box settings have been
fine apart from having to re-compile espeak. However, some sound
hardware, especially Sound Blaster and/or emu10k based boards seem to
need a bit of tweaking to get right. 

The pulseaudio web site use to have some info on various hardware
known to be problematic or requiring special settings. Might be
worthwhile checking there. In particular, both the pulseaudio and alsa
web sites use to curse some of the sound blaster cards/drivers for
having significant issues/bugs. 

Tim



Jason White writes:
 > The problem turned out to be an error in the Debian packaging that probably
 > also affects Ubuntu users. I've submitted a patch.
 > 
 > This doesn't solve my Emacspeak speech server/Espeak problems - in fact, it
 > makes them worse: I now get very broken up audio as soon as I interrupt speech
 > for any reason. Has anyone else seen this when using PulseAudio for output?
 > Any suggestions?
 > 
 > On the positive side, if we can call it that, I haven't lost speech entirely
 > during the few minutes that I've tested with PulseAudio properly enabled.
 > 
 > We aren't out of the woods but I hope we're starting to get a map of the
 > terrain.
 > 
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 > 

-- 
Tim Cross
IT Security Manager
Information Technology 
University of New England
 Phone: +61 2 6773 3210
Mobile: 0428 212217
E-Mail: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
   Web: http://www.une.edu.au/itd
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