trouble with Espeak and ALSA

[C . M . Brannon]

> Whenever a sample is played, the first few frames of speech are 
> cut off, so I lose the first syllable or two of each utterance.  This does 
> not happen if I run espeak directly.  Has anyone else run into this?

I just upgraded to ALSA 1.0.16 on one of my boxes (they all run grml), and
I notice the same thing.  The command-line espeak program doesn't drop
the first few seconds of audio data.  However, other apps that use
alsa do so.  This includes aplay!
E.G.,
espeak -w test.wav 'Hello world.'
aplay test.wav
gives the output "world" on my box.
So it isn't an SD issue; it's an alsa issue.

BTW, the command-line espeak program still seems to prefer OSS to ALSA,
at least on some installations.  This is also true of the eflite speech
server for Emacspeak.
So these programs are un affected.

I checked http://bugs.debian.org/libasound2 earlier today, and there is
no mention of this one.

-- Chris