garbled speech, .pulse directory, etc

[Andre Nuno Soares]

Hello all,

There seems to be 2 different "scenarios", both with problems, in
Karmic:

 1) ~/.pulse_a11y_nostart file *AND* autospawn = no in
~/.pulse/client.conf 

What works:
 - espeak in orca, through speech-dispatcher & gnome-speech
 - Rythmbox (only tested with local mp3)
 - mpg123

What doesn't work:
 - festival in orca through gnome-speech
 - System>Preferences>Sound hangs waiting for sound system
 - no Gnome sounds: no login sound, no alert sounds, etc.
 - Totem has no sound, playing music or videos
 - there's no volume control, but you can use gnome-alsamixer for it.


 2) no ~/.pulse_a11y_nostart file *OR* autospawn = yes in
~/.pulse/client.conf

What works:
 - everything )System>Preferences>Sound, Volume Control, Totem, Gnome
sounds, etc)

What doesn't work:
 - espeak in Orca through Gnome-Speech is garbled, you can only
understand longer sentences. The beginning and end of words seem to be
cut
 - with Speech-Dispatcher the "chopiness" isn't so noticeable, but it is
still there, especially if you compare the speech with scenario 1
 - festival through gnome-speech works, but sounds like 2 or more people
at the same time.


What seems to happen:
 - In scenario 1 there's no pulseaudio running when you finish the
login, so during this process something detects the .pulse_a11y* file
and stops pulseaudio.
 - if autospawn is set to yes, the next client to "need" pulseaudio
spawns it (scenario 2).
 - If there's no .pulse_a11y* file, pulseaudio is never stopped, so
autospawn isn't relevant (scenario 2 also).


Fixing it:
 - The only real bugs (bug?) are the speech problems in scenario 2, and
they scream "buffer problem", especially the chopiness in espeak. There
are some possible work-arounds in this open bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-orca/+bug/354522

 - the .pulse_a11y* file worked very well in Jaunty,but with the greater
integration of pulse in karmic should probably be removed, but only
after fixing the chopiness of speech 


This is what I've concluded after 1 week of problems. Can anyone confirm
this, or show me the error of my ways? :-)


Hope it helped to clarify some of the problems being reported, and maybe
get us closer to fixing a11y in karmic.

Andre