[raspberry-vi] Re: eSpeak tts, latency, portaudio and pulseaudio

  • From: "Agent Orange" <agentorange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2014 12:55:44 -0000

Happy new year Mike, and thanks for your continued efforts to get TTS to
work on the Pi.  Your latest report sounds promising.

Kind regards

Phil


-----Original Message-----
From: raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:raspberry-vi-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mike Ray
Sent: 01 January 2014 00:40
To: raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [raspberry-vi] eSpeak tts, latency, portaudio and pulseaudio


Hello list,

Today I have tried the following experiments to solve the latency issues
with eSpeak tts which is causing stuttering in long spoken segments and also
causing the kernel oops which makes SpeakUp unusable with Arch (and other
distros) later than our 'frozen' Arch image:

1.  I tried compiling eSpeak for version 19 of portaudio instead of the
default version 18.  Unfortunately this makes no difference to the
stuttering audio.

2.  I compiled eSpeak to use pulseaudio.

I have managed to confirm that this DOES solve the stuttering tts, this
command:

dmesg | espeak

Yields a perfect splurge of the boot messages with no stuttering.

Now the problems...

Configuring pulseaudio is proving something of a house of cards.  I want to
configure it as a daemon which starts at boot time.  This is because with
the lower power of the Pi I think this might be better than autospawning a
server on demand.  It is likely to be more responsive than having a server
die after periods of idleness and then restarting again.

But at the moment I can't get the daemon to start.

This is likely not to be the only issue.  If I get pulse to run I fully
expect to have to do some juggling to get SpeakUp and Emacspeak to run
together.

If I can get SpeakUp to run I will possibly release an image without
Emacspeak.  This will solve the issue for those waiting for a Hynix chipset
bootable image with SpeakUp.



Note that if I can get pulse to play nice on Arch and it solves the issues,
including the kernel oops, then it is likely I can also get Raspbian to work
reliably.  Which it currently does NOT.

It's my intention to read all I can find about pulseaudio over the next few
days until I can configure it in the dark, so to speak.

Mike


--
Michael A. Ray
Analyst/Programmer
Witley, Surrey, South-east UK

I KEEP six honest serving-men, They taught me all I know. Their names are
What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
-- Rudyard Kipling (paraphrased)

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Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013

=========================================================== 
The raspberry-vi mailing list 
Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/raspberry-vi
Administrative contact: <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are trademarks of the Raspberry Pi 
Foundation.

This list is not affiliated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the views and 
attitudes expressed by the subscribers to this list do not reflect those of the 
Foundation.

Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013

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