Re: OSS-ViaVoice and emacspeak 13

[Random Factor <random@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> 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.

To play the midi icons, you must have a midi synthesisor built into your sound card (I know it seems obvious, but newer sound cards rarely have this).  Also, you must first initialise the midi voices, using a seperate midi program.  That would eliminate the message "Getting OPL3 - Initializing voice 0 with undefined instrument".

The Soft OSS Mixer is NOT an option.  It works by first scaling all input streams up to somthing like 44kHz, which even without mixing places a large strain on the cpu.  There were some messages about this recently which you could check the archive for.

> 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)

Ok, this is interesting to me, as I have a soundcard that provides 2 dsp interfaces, dsp0 and dsp1.  I CAN'T get the auditory icons going for some reason though :(.  Did you do anything other than what you just described above?
  
> 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?

As far as I can tell what you need to do is play a small midi file before you start emacspeak with the midi icons.  That is known to often work.
 
> Best regards,
> 
> Per Egil Kummervold
> Norway
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

James.

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