Dmix and Interruptability

[Lukas Loehrer]

Depending on your version of libasound, dmix should be used by the
default device anyway, thus you should not be required to do anything
special. The problem with overlapping speech is indeed related to
dmix. What works for me is forcing the buffer and period size to a
rather low value. 

For system services like speech-dispatcher, you wil have to set these
values in the system wide Alsa configuration file. On Debian, that is

/etc/asound.conf

The syntax of these alsa config files is rather complicated. The
easiest way to get something going is to start from a file that works
for someone else. One that is somewhat well tested is  in the
emacspeak svn repository:

http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/servers/linux-outloud/asoundrc

The above file also arranges things in such a way that you can use the sound 
card
for audio recording and still use dmix.

Try copying the above file to /etc/asound.conf. Have speech-dispatcher
configured in such a way that it uses the default alsa device. Make
sure all programs using the sound card have quit and restart
speech-dispatcher. 

If you are lucky, you should now be able to fix the overlapping speech
problem by tweaking the values for the buffer and period size in the
above file and programs other than speech-dispatcher should be able to
use the sound card simultaneously. 

Best regards, Lukas