speech dispatcher not connecting to alsa

[Bart Bunting]

Hi,

Are you sure that emacspeak is using alsa?

If you do a c-e c-s does it say "viavoice using alsa" or just "viavoice"
If the latter then you are only using oss emulation.  If this is the case
speech dispatcher won't work as expected.

You should have an atcleci.so in the Linux-outloud subdir of the servers
directory in your emacspeak installation.

If you have this file and you are still hearing "viavoice" and not "viavoice
using alsa" the issue may be that you don't have the alsa headers installed.
The outloud script checks for the presence of one of the .h files to
determine if you have alsa available.

The easiest thing to do if this is the case is to install the libasound2-dev
package.

HTH

Bart

-----Original Message-----
From: speechd-bounces at lists.freebsoft.org
[mailto:speechd-bounces at lists.freebsoft.org] On Behalf Of Rob Hill
Sent: Tuesday, 13 January 2009 1:12 PM
To: speechd at lists.freebsoft.org
Subject: speech dispatcher not connecting to alsa 

Hello list,

I've as yet been unable to get orca working with speech dispatcher  on
Intrepid.
I've tried permutations of system and user setup, different output
modules etc to no avail.  A typical output of the
var/log/speech-dispatcher/espeak.log file is:

 Tue Jan 13 14:49:13 2009 [528318] ALSA: Opening ALSA sound output
 Tue Jan 13 14:49:13 2009 [528379] ALSA: Opening ALSA device
ALSA lib pcm.c:2196:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pcm.dmixer
 Tue Jan 13 14:49:13 2009 [531909] ALSA ERROR: Cannot open audio device
pcm.dmixer (No such file or directory)
 Tue Jan 13 14:49:13 2009 [531937] ALSA ERROR: Cannot initialize Alsa device
'pcm.dmixer': Can't open.


I usually hear the dummy module message.  My setup is as follows:

I have disabled pulseaudio according to the method given at:

http://idyllictux.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/alsa-instead-of-pulseaudio-for-ub
untu-810-intrepid-a-non-destructive-way/

with all tabs in preferences-sounds-devices set to alsa, and all
system sounds disabled.  I use emacspeak from a console, with voxin
(ibmtts) and flite, which work perfectly.  When I use orca, it is via
espeak, which at the moment is very sluggish, but which does work via
gnome speech.  I use a .asoundrc file taken from the emacspeak
distribution, but removing it has no effect on whether speech
dispatcher works.  

I tried to install speech-dispatcher by installing the speech-dispatcher
and python-speechd packages, then using spd-conf.  

So the problem seems to be getting speech dispatcher to connect to
alsa.  All other audio on my system works fine, though.

any help appreciated.

Thanks,

Rob 

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