More on SD crashes

[Tomas Cerha]

Hello Hermann,

First of all, thank you for your persistance and effort in reporting
your problems.

Hermann wrote:
> So I rebuilt Espeak using the portaudio0.19 header file, because I
> thought that may help. Portaudio0.19 supports Alsa for Espeak.

This should not have any effect, since the Espeak's audio output is not
used at all in SD.  Sound data are returned to SD and SD performs the
audio output.

> This afternoon I figured out a strange thing: If one sets the loglevel
> in speechd.conf to "5", there were no more crashes.
> I will test this in a long range test, but the question is: What has
> the loglevel to do with SD's performance with Espeak?

Well, this may be a sign of some timing/synchronization, or maybe
threading problem.

> Is it really a solution to fill up my hard drive with huge logfiles in
> order to get SD and Espeak run stable?

No, definitely not, but it is an interesting observation which may help
in tracing the real problem.

> The only working alternatives are either change SD's output to OSS, or
> use Espeak-Generic. Both are workarounds but not that desirable.
> The third alternative is to use a nonfree synth, such as ttsynth or
> voxin (whatever that former viavoice is called now).
> But why use open source when you have to buy a speech synth in the end?

Of, course, that would be sad.

Anyway, as far as I know, the problem only appears on some systems.
Some users reported the issue went away after upgrading the system,
although it is not clear which exact versions of which components are
causing it.

Best regards, Tomas