Sluggishness with libao as Output Method

[Steve Holmes]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 11:53:01PM +0200, Halim Sahin wrote:
> iHi,
> No, I haven't seen any problems in the libao driver using alsa.
> I use it here with speechd 0.7.1 and espeak.
> When I try to use alsa it has more problems here.
> One of these is the speech interupt.
> When I navigate quickly through menus, espeak talks every new string
> before the previous one was stopped.
> This results in several espeak output at the same time.
> With the libao driver I see no problems.

That problem sounds like what I experience when I use the dmix plug-in
on my old laptop.  On that machine, I have older stuff because of
harware limitations.  On my current desktop box, I have a fully
multichannel sound card so never bother with dmix and alsa output
method has been sharp and quick and interrupts right on the spot.

> I have 
> default_driver=alsa
> in my /etc/libao.conf.

So do I.

These hardware differences make the linux audio system to be a real
pain to work with consistently.