speech dispatcher not connecting to alsa

[Hynek Hanke]

Rob Hill wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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. 
Yes, I think so.
>  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.
>   
Well, normally these two can work together at the same
time. There might have been several issues however.
If the two are not configured at a different port (they
are, if you use spd-conf) then, the user Dispatcher will
refuse to start. There might as well be confusion at the
point where you use spd-say to test it. It is possible that
although you started a user Speech Dispatcher, you still
connected to the system one through spd-say, so you might have
wrongfully concluded that the user Dispatcher doesn't
mix through ALSA as well.

So the easiest way to avoid the confusion is to have
only one Dispatcher running when you are testing things,
but in principle, both of them can co-exist very well.

Please let me know if you find out anything new. It seems
now that you are not the only one having this problem.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke