OSS-ViaVoice and emacspeak 13

[Per Egil Kummervold <peregil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
I'm a new subscriber of this list, and thought I should share with you my
experiences trying to install emacspeak on an IBM Thinkpad 600 with
ViaVoice and the commercial (free trial) OSS.

First of all, I would like to say that I think you are doing an excellent
job. Emacspeak have some really revolutionary ideas in auditory user
interfaces. I'm not a blind user myself - My reason for trying out
emacspeak is partly a general interst in user interfaces, and partly a
privat project of mine trying to "hack together" a non-visual portable
sollution that I can use for reading my mail, browsing the web, playing
mp3's and taking notes. Emacspeak is much closer to this goal than any
other sollutions I have looked at - actually it is the only sollution I
have looked at that is thinking auditory and not pramarily visual.

So to my experiences (and questions):
Getting ViaVoice and emacspeak up was fairly easy. The performance on an
Pentium II MMX is impressive. 

However I am having problems with the auditory icons. Still I cant find a
was to use midi-icons.

I first tried to install stdiosynth (having a lot of troubles finding what
to do with the binary - until I figured out it had to be placed 
in /usr/bin/). Still no luck with getting it to work though.

So I installed a trial version of OSS. Now I can play midi-files with
mplay. After
installing the SoftOSS Mixer the "Getting OPL3 - Initializing voice 0 with
undefined instrument" disapeared. However I can still not get
midi-auditory-icons functioning, and the performance (after installing the
Soft OSS Mixer) is terrible. Via Voice can't keep up with even slow
typing.

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong? Does stdiosynth have any function
here at all (after installing the SoftOSS-mixer)? 

The following does however work: Turning auditory icons on locally (C-e
C-a), then turning off midi-icons (C-e M-a) and then restarting the speech
server (C-e C-s).. plays the au/wav-files as auditory icons. (Recuires
the SoftOSS Mixer module to be installed)
 
But...as I said the performance is really terrible - and hardly useful on
a PII as long as I have to use the SoftOSS-mixer.

Have anyone had similar experiences? 
Can anyone explain to me how emaspeak plays midi-files, and how I can find
out what is wrong when they does not work?

Best regards,

Per Egil Kummervold
Norway

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