espeak, pulseAudio and ALSA. Success!

["T.V. Raman" <tv.raman.tv@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tim,

first off, thanks for an excellent write-off -- this from someone
who counts himself among those who have "fixed pulseaudio by
disabling it":-)

I agree that eventually Pulseaudio will get us to a better place
than where alsa leaves us today -- just as alsa took us to a
better place from OSS.

While waiting for the bits to settle, here are a few tips that
are worthwhile with or without pulseaudio.

1. Controlling volume of music while not reducing TTS  volume

Both mplayer and alsaplayer let you do this -- see the relevant
emacspeak commands. They're bound to 'v' in those modes.

2. Ability to select which soundcard to send output to will be
nice --- alsa is supposed to let you do this, but it's not easy
-- at least the env vars fail. You can tell mplayer to send
output to a different card fairly easily --- having viavoice or
espeak speak on a second alternative card is harder.
-- 

-- 


On 4/4/10, Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Jason,
>
> thanks for the feedback. Some brief comments below.
>
>  > Thank you for an excellent summary, Tim. PulseAudio has been on my list
> of
>  > projects to investigate for quite a while, but it has stayed there due to
> the
>  > complications you describe.
>  >
>  > The most I can add are minor comments.
>  >
>  > 1. If you're familiar with Git, I would suggest installing the etckeeper
>  > package to track changes to configuration files. Emacs has excellent
> support
>  > for Git as of version 23. The etckeeper package is available for Debian;
> I
>  > assume it is likely to have entered the Ubuntu repository as well.
>  >
> Good pointer. I use to use RCS for this, but have not yet got around to
> setting somethig up on this box yet. I've wanted an excuse to get use to
> git,
> so this might be it.
>
>
>  > 2. Real-time scheduling under Linux is the subject of ongoing kernel
>  > development, which, if ultimately integrated, will lead to significant
> change.
>  > There has for example been discussion, documented at Linux Weekly News
>  > (http://lwn.net/Articles/378044/) of introducing a deadline CPU scheduler
> for
>  > real-time processes.
>  >
> Yes. Much of the confusion I ran into with getting pulseaudio working is due
> to recent new features in the 2.6.31 kernel that affects this area. There is
> a
> section on the kernel.org site dealing with realtime scheduling. I suspect
> things will become 'richer' in this area with newer versions of the kernel.
>
>
>  > 3. I agree with your general conclusion that it will take time for Linux
>  > distributors to address all of the pertinent configuration problems, and
> for
>  > hardware-dependent issues to be solved. Unlike conventional UNIX
> development,
>  > where the operating system maintainer was typically also the hardware
> vendor,
>  > Linux is designed to be compatible with a very wide range of
> environments,
>  > from mobile phones to super-computers and with numerous combinations of
>  > components. I am sure this considerably magnifies the difficulty of the
>  > development effort, even without taking account of the fact that some
> hardware
>  > manufacturers are uncooperative, though this appears to be somewhat less
>  > common now than it used to be. PulseAudio has gained a reputation,
>  > acknowledged by its authors, for exposing driver and hardware-related
> bugs.
>  >
> Yes. It was sad to note that recently I saw something that indicated NVIDIA
> is
> pulling out of supporting drivers for Linux. Some of the sound card vendors
> have been even less supportive. All of this makes it very hard to get things
> working reliably 'out of the box'.
>
> What I'm very pleased about is that, despite the hassle, I was able to get a
> pulseaudio configuration working. It takes a bit of work and there are a lot
> of variables that make it very hard to provide a simple recipe.
> Unfortunately,
> this has given pulse a bit of a bad name, which it probably doesn't deserve.
> I
> do think pulseAudio can really improve utility of sound on Linux and hope
> that
> more people begin to put in the effort to get things working and they
> communicate their successes to help others.
>
> Tim
>
> --
> 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.
> --
> 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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