[pulseaudio-discuss] [orca-list] update on the antergos problems (fwd)

[Jude DaShiell]

-- 


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 05:27:12
From: Didier Spaier <didier at slint.fr>
To: kendell clark <coffeekingms at gmail.com>,
     "orca-list at gnome.org" <orca-list at gnome.org>
Subject: Re: [orca-list] update on the antergos problems

Hello Kendell,

[quoted lines from kendell clark]
> Followed by reinstalling pulse audio to restore the configuration. I can?t figure out why this works when there doesn?t seem to be anything wrong with pulse audio or it?s settings, but this fixes orca. For a little while, and then it messes up again in a few reboots. This is ?confusing, since all other apps that use pulse ?audio, like media players and the like continue to work, it?s only orca and speech dispatcher that are affected. Would the debian guys who maintain speech dispatcher mind taking a look at speech dispatcher?s pulse audio code and refactoring it? This is probably the source of the problem.

I very much doubt that the pulse audio code in speech dispatcher be guilty.
Rather I would suspect audio settings.

I had a look at the building stuff of the Debian package in this compressed archive:
http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/s/speech-dispatcher/speech-dispatcher_0.8.8-1.debian.tar.xz
and didn't find anything weird.
They just compile the source code with few patching.
A patch set to use espeak-ng instead of espeak. We do the same in Slint, this can't hurt.
Another patch (attached) just increase the default latency when using pulseaudio, I also doubt it comes into play.

For what it's worth, you could try to rely on alsa instead of pulse as audio output method. That's what we do in Slint.

If you want to try, first check that you have a working alsa backend in speech dispatcher, issuing this command:
spd-conf --test-alsa
If you hear a sound, as stated in the output, you can proceed to the next steps.

First, either edit if it exists ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, else /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf to have (uncommented):
AudioOutputMethod "alsa"
Alternatively, run as regular user:
spd-conf
After some questions you will hear this one:
Default audio output method [pulse] :
>
type alsa then.

Now to have output of speech-dispacher though alsa and output of other sound apps nicely coexisting you could edit /etc/pulse/default.pa to have these two lines included:
load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix
load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

But also check that you don't have alsa output redirected to pulse:
For instance if you have in /etc/asound.conf these two lines:
pcm.default pulse
ctl.default pulse
comment them out or just remove them.

Also, in Slint we make espeak-1.48.04 use portaudio, not pulseaudio. This is to have espeakup rely on alsa too in a console (text mode).

So as a summary what I suggest is to have all speech apps relying to alsa, leaving pulseaudio used by other sound applications.

Although I have no idea if this is applicable as-is to antergos, I hope this helps.

Greetings,

Dider Spaier
Slint distribution: http://slint.fr
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