[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio 0.9.15 and no sound on Ubuntu

[Luke Yelavich]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 02:03:46AM EST, Hynek Hanke wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to correct myself that the last positive results
> that I reported in ``Distribution kernels and glitch-free''
> were still on 0.9.14 because our earlier attempt to install
> 0.9.15 from Debian wasn't really successful, which we missed.
>
> We however tried to install 0.9.15 now from Ubuntu Karmic
> and we can't get any sound to play (it seems to be playing,
> but we can't hear sound). The logfiles and pacmd ls are here:

I have just tried using speech-dispatcher with pulseaudio, as per the latest changes from CVS, with version 0.9.15 of pulseaudio on Ubuntu Karmic, with a recompiled kernel to enable preempt, and set Hz to 1000. I am using a Realtek ALC885 hda chip with glitch-free enabled, and default speech-dispatcher configuration, except for using pulseaudio for output, with the espeak speech synthesizer.

Speech-dispatcher through pulseaudio now seems to behave worse than prior to the changes in cvs. Speech seems to react quickly enough when you attempt to speak a line of text using the Orca screen reader for example, however if that line of text is long, and you press a key to move onto the next line, speech doesn't cut off immediately and start on the next line. The first line finishes speaking first, then the second line is spoken. The audio from the speech synthesizer via pulse also breaks up every second or so for maybe a second, then resumes speaking. I'll revert the changes from CVS to be sure I correctly recall how speech-dispatcher + pulseaudio behaved.

Just for some context for those reading along, it is quite possible to have very responsive speech when using speech-dispatcher via alsa, and no pulseaudio running. You can quickly arrow through lines of text, and they will be spoken quickly, and when one moves to a new line of text, the previous line is cut off, and the new line is spoken.

Feel free to suggest settings to try for any component in this stack, and i'll get back to you.

Luke