Pico module doesn't work with alsa

[Luke Yelavich]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 06:33:40AM AEST, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've tried the pico speechd module, but it does not work with alsa, it
> produces extremely slow audio.  With pulseaudio there is no such issue.

Just to verify, this is with the native alsa backend, and not via libao? I 
suspect the libao backend would be fine as well.

It has long been known that the alsa backend needs some love, since it has some 
rather annoying bugs. There is an alternative through the use of libao, however 
in my experience, using libao with either its alsa or pulse backends has some 
annoying latency. I also don't claim to have any great knowledge of the alsa 
API, and what is more, the alsa API is rather complex, so I don't know when 
I'll get around to trying to address the alsa backend issues. We could 
certainly consider using libao's alsa code as a template for a rewritten alsa 
backend.

Luke

Luke