Gentoo, Allison Voice oss_audio problem

[micah]

The program works fine aslong as im not playing any other audio. Here is the error message i get.

Code: Select all

micah@Unpredictable:~$ swift 'hello'
oss_audio: failed to open audio device /dev/dsp


Alsa version 1.0.14_rc3
Kernel 2.6.25

[AdamW]

We've encountered many such audio device issues internally at Cepstral while setting up new machines for voice building under Linux. To make all the sinking in an inch of water more fun, here are in summary the conditions under which the message above occurs:

- The audio device is locked by a process exclusively. Playing audio using Firefox off the internet seems to do it.

- The audio device has restrictive permissions that don't allow users to open it except through programs with special permissions. Fiddling with this aspect is basically a hack.

I'm not very familiar with oss_audio. We've had better luck switching from oss_audio to different, and newer audio drivers (esd then finally pulseaudio in esd emulation). pulseaudio runs as a daemon. Of late, it has developed the need to be told explicitly to relinquish the device after a finite time of no activity. In our case, given the speed of an audio engineer, we've settled on 0.1 sec as a time-out.

I know I'm a bit late with this reply (I wasn't with Cepstral when it was posted), but at least I am catching up.
And putting it out there might hopefully help some errant soul :)