Re:Sometimes bad responsiveness with outloud and alsa 1.0.16

["Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just a followup on this. I have had one box with an Audigy 4 card that is
really playing up. I get really slow character echo and often words spoken
twice. I've spent hours trying to get a better asoundrc file, but with no
luck. 

On another box, running an older SB Live card, I was also getting som
eproblems, but nowwhere  as bad. 

I've found that under both Debian testing and unstable, I still need a
.asoundrc file. Without one, I get unusable output from outloud. 

I've also noticed I'm getting segmentation faults from outloud on both
systems. Not sure why yet. 

I removed all the sound stuff I didn't need, such as jackd, pulseaudio,
portaudio and other sundry packages installed as dependencies for various
other programs I've tried out. This appears to have fixed the problem on
one box. I've yet to try it on the other. 

The better performance now is on the Debian unstable box with the SB Live
card. The Debian testing box running with an Audigy 4 card is nearly
unusable because character echo is really slow (other spects of the speech
are fine). 

Tim

Lukas Loehrer writes:
 > 
 > On Debian sid with libasound2-1.0.16-2, I am getting very bad
 > responsiveness with the outloud speech server in some situations. The
 > problem goes away after downgrading to libasound2 1.0.15-3.
 > 
 > Responsiveness is not generally bad, but only in some situations. The
 > problem is easier to see with low speech-rates. The problem is for
 > example reproducible in in an info buffer when cycling from links to
 > links with the tab key. Voice locking must be enabled.
 > 
 > 1. Hit tab to jump to a link
 > 2. wait a bit until emacspeak is in the middle of reading the actual link text
 > 3. Hit tab again to get to the next link
 > 
 > What should happen: speech should stop imediately and the next link should be read.
 > What happens with libasound 1.0.16-2: The text of the first link is read to the end and then the text of the second link is read.
 > 
 > Similar effects can be observed when moving through code line by line
 > and some font-locking is present. 
 > 
 > I have not yet been able to nail down the problem to a specific alsa
 > api call, but it is probably either snd_pcm_writei() or snd_pcm_drop()
 > whose behavior must have  changed in a subtle way in 1.0.16. I cannot produce
 > a short test case that reproduces the problem, so reporting the bug to
 > either Debian or Alsa is difficult. Can anyone reproduce the described
 > behavior?
 > 
 > Best regards, Lukas
 > 
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-- 
Tim Cross
tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.

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