speech dispatcher not connecting to alsa

[Rob Hill]

Hello Hynek and list,

Well, sd is now working, in user mode.  

As you suggested, I did killall speech-dispatcher before starting it
in user mode, and that worked.

ps ax shows no sign of pulse.  I've now edited
/etc/defaults/speech-dispatcher to prevent it from starting as a
system service.

Could you confirm that my understanding of what was going on is
correct?  This is:  I first tried to install sd as a system service.
This didn't work, because of a possible alsa bug preventing audio
streams from two different users from mixing.  I then tried installing
sd as a user service, and this didn't work because the
/etc/default/speech-dispatcher was still there starting the system service.


I haven't tried updating my libasound2 package to the one from jaunty
yet.  I will do, and file a bug report with alsa if still unable to
mix streams from two different users.

Many thanks for your patience and help.  The improvement in the
responsiveness of orca has certainly made the effort worthwhile.

Regards,

Rob 

Hynek Hanke writes:
 > 
 > Rob Hill wrote:
 > > I did notice that while aplay was running from
 > > the sd account, I was unable to start another audio stream.
 > >   
 > Well, this is strange, very non-standard behavior
 > and it seems like another manifestation of the
 > same problem.
 > 
 > Are you sure that in the situation where you try
 > to run Speech Dispatcher as user (not just spd-say,
 > the whole Speech Dispatcher), then you are not
 > actually running the system one as well? To be sure,
 > first do
 >    sudo killall speech-dispatcher
 > then launch the user speech dispatcher and try with
 > spd-say. Does it produce the famous error log message
 > about dmix unable to open or does it say that it can't
 > connect to speechd?
 > > I don't think I have enough knowledge to determine that pulseaudio is
 > > definitely not running.
 > Just repeatedly do
 >   ps -ax | grep pulse
 > (at least before and after your sound experiment)
 > > 2.  Sometimes the message from the dummy output module is spoken.  In
 > > this case, surely sd is connecting to alsa, but not via a useful
 > > output module?
 > >   
 > Well, dummy tries different ways to output audio, principally
 > it tries to use 'aplay'. It doesn't use the native speechd sound
 > library, so this is of little use in your case.
 > 
 > There have in past been similar problems in dmix, but to
 > my knowledge, they were fixed. It is possible though that
 > they still persist on some soundcards. Did you try to
 > upgrade libasound2 to the newest version from Jaunty?
 > 
 > Other than that, I believe that you should contact
 > the developers of alsa with the above "aplay from sd
 > and aplay from user dont mix" problem.
 > 
 > With regards,
 > Hynek Hanke
 >