Audio server(s) support in Speech Dispatcher (Re: No output!)

[Hynek Hanke]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 11:43:29AM +0100, Tomas Cerha wrote:
> >>As for replacing the Flite sound library in Speech Dispatcher
> >>with something better, I thing the NAS library looks good,
> >>but it would require users to install yet an additional application.
> >>If this is not what we want, I'd recommend to remain waiting
> >>for something suitable (liba(i)o is not currently).
> 
> Yes, but for people who are currently using ESD it might be a problem since 
> ESD
> and NAS can't be used simultaneously.

Actually, I heard you can let ESD talk to NAS and thus run them
simultaneously. But I the configuration might take some time and
might require installing some other application or patching ESD.
I didn't try it.

> But as we need something now and ESD seems not to be suitable, we probably 
> have
> to force people to replace ESD with something suitable.  However I would not
> require NAS, since nowadays there are many sondcards with hardware support for
> multiple inputs on one DSP device, so we should also support direct DSP 
> output.
> I think there are two possibilities:
> * using an interface library that is able at least of NAS and DSP output 
> (maybe
> the NAS library?).

I think that the NAS library talks directly to /dev/dsp if NAS is not
running. So it could be done this way.

> * using direct DSP output and relying on audiooss.

This is no win since I don't know about any suitable library for DSP
other than the NAS library.

Regards,
Hynek