Re: ViaVoice Outloud, PulseAudio and Ubuntu 11.04

[Bart Bunting <bart@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tim,

Can you make any comments regarding the latency of the viavoice server
with this setup?

Cheers

Bart
 
On Wed, 18 May 2011 14:50:16 +1000, "Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> I'll preface the following by saying that this is only an outline of my recent
> experiences and others may not have as much luck. Issues, such as sound card
> type and manufacturer, ALSA driver support etc, means there can be a lot of
> variation in this area. 
> 
> A while back, I posted to this list regarding the success I had achieved with
> espeak and pulse audio. I reported that I'd found that the emacspeak espeak
> driver, compiled with portaudio support did not work well. It was sluggish and
> had a tendency to chop off ends of words or skip words. I found that
> re-compiling it against pulseaudio rather than portaudio fixed these issues. 
> 
> At the time, despite numerous different strategies, I was never able to get
> good quality ViaVoice outloud output with pulse audio. In fact, I had never
> been able to get good quality outloud output without customizing ALSA via a
> .asoundrc file.  
> 
> Recently, I have upgraded my system to Ubuntu 11.04. I decided to re-examine
> matters and see if I could get a better outcome. One problem I had with the
> existing setup was that when running emacspeak and the outloud server, pulse
> audio was blocked and so I could not run any app built with pulse audio. 
> 
> Given this was an upgrade and had lots of new libraries, my first step was to
> remove all alsa and pulse audio configurations. I removed my .asoundrc file and
> restored all pulse settings to their default, rebooted the system and then
> started playing around to see what I needed to do to get as much working as I
> could. 
> 
> The outcome was surprising. For the first time ever, all my sound related
> systems on this desktop are working 'out of the box'. I have Outloud running
> via pulse audio, can run multiple sound sources, both pure ALSA and pulse audio
> systems simultaneously and have full control over each independently of each
> other. 
> 
> The system I am using is a Dell 32bit desktop with an internal 'on-board'
> soundcard from Intel. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04. This system has been running
> Ubuntu since 8.04 and has only been upgraded and not re-installed since its
> original setup. 
> 
> Looks like Linux sound support is really beginning to mature and provide
> similar functionality to what is common on other more expensive and locked down
> solutions. 
> 
> Tim
>  
> -- 
> Tim Cross
> Information Technology 
> University of New England
>  Phone: +61 2 6773 3210
> Mobile: 0428 212217
>    Fax: +61 2 6773 3424
> E-Mail: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
>    Web: http://www.une.edu.au/itd
> ---
> Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
> See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
> 
> Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a
> touch of genius (and a lot of courage) to move in the opposite direction.
>                                                            âAlbert Einstein
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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