LinuxSound

This is a bit of a "head's up" for those people who may be trying/struggling to get misterhouse to - for example - play music and also at the same time be able to speak under linux. You may find, for example, that misterhouse is silent whilst playing music and only after stopping (say) xmms your misterhouse server starts speaking all the queued up messages.

There are a number of different ways to enable your linux server to multiplex sound, and many different theories as to which way is better. Some people prefer to use ALSA because it's not proprietary as opposed to ARTS which is installed by default under many distributions such as Redhat. The trouble with alsa at the moment is it can be a bit fiddly to configure as it is not currently part of the linux kernel used in most distributions (it will be when 2.5 is released). Anyhow, even after successfully getting alsa installed, there can be some issues with getting multiple applications to use the sound card concurrently - this is because not all alsa sound card drivers support multiplexing.

So.....

If you want to use alsa, good for you. I won't get involved in which system is better, and of course there are some other commercial alternatives out there that a number of people also use and swear by. Anyhow, I'll just describe what can be done to get things working with arts IF you are using it AND are also having problems.

1. Install your distribution as you would normally, and ensure that arts is also installed/configured. As previously noted, many distros such as Redhat use arts by default so you won't have to do anything special - everything should be automagically detected. If you open up a terminal session and type "ps -ef | grep artsd" you should see a line showing the details of the artsd daemon. 2. Install flite - again depends on distro. With gentoo you can just do an "emerge flite". If you don't have a package available for your distro, you can get the source from http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ and try to build it yourself. There are other speech engines you can use of course, but this is probably the easiest to get running so it's what I'll use in this demonstration. 3. From a command prompt type "flite -t hello -o play" - you should hear a very bad hello from your computer 4. Fire up an application such as a music player that can use arts. If you use something like xmms, make sure that it is actually using arts (with xmms, go into options/preferences and check that the outplut plugin being used is the "aRts driver"). Now load up a playlist, put it on repeat, and start playing music. 5. Now try step 3 again - you'll probably find that it appears to hang. Just kill it with a "ctrl c" 6. Now try "artsdsp flite -t hello -o play" instead - you should hear music AND a bad "hello".

Why is it so? Well, by default flite - and a number of other applications - when trying to create sound directly access the sound device (usually something like /dev/dsp). By using the wrapper "artsdsp" before running an application such as flite, any calls to the sound device by the program are trapped and redirected to the arts server - basically it forces the application to "play nice" and not grab exclusive use of the sound device.

So how do I now use flite and misterhouse? Well, you just need to change the line in your ini file that tells misterhouse where flite is located. Go to a command prompt and type "which artsdsp". This will let you know exactly where the artsdsp program is located. Do the same for flite (eg "which flite"). Now change your mh.private.ini file as follows:

voice_text= flite voice_text_flite=/usr/kde/3.1/bin/artsdsp /usr/bin/flite

(Naturally, change the program locations depending on where your programs live).

Now, restart misterhouse and keep xmms (or whatever) running and playing music. You should now be able to do something like go to the ia5 web interface, select misterhouse, then misterhouse home, then browse mr house, and then click on the "what is your up time" and be able to hear mister house talking whilst music is also a happening thing!

Of course, as noted before you can use the same wrapper for other programs that may not directly support arts - for example if you install festival, you can test it by typing something like "echo 'Hello from Festival'| artsdsp festival --tts".

A little clarification: aRts is not installed by default by Red Hat (and other distros), but more properly it is installed with KDE. Gnome uses eSound (looks like sOund sYstems have its own nOtation ;-). You can use any sound system but, of course, Gnome apps only support eSound, and KDE ones support aRts...

eSound has some nice features like on demand loading (fire up XMMS, tell it to use eSound, play, and esd --eSound's daemon-- will load if not running already) and auto-termination when the last client exits. Of course there is an equivalent audio rerouter to artsdsp: you got it, esddsp, wich can be used in the same way with flite or whatever (but it, miserabily, sounds even worst!).

A quick note to Red Hat 9 users: the arts rpm that comme with the original dist is messed up. You'll need to install arts-devel (normally innecessary) for arts to work (especifically, it needs the file /usr/lib/libartscbackend.la).

I'll give a try to the alsa drivers. After all, they where the first to support my soundcard under linux.

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This is my experience getting sound working on my hp pavilion a340n, centos 5.5, mh 2.105. I could play all the files in /sounds/ using xmms (except the trek files). When I tried to play them in mh the file hello_from_bruce.wav sounded like it was running slow (played noticeably longer) and was scratchy. From a suggestion on the forum I went to http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration/ and used the links there to install both the RELH5 versions of "RPM Fusion" I should mention that there is a note at the bottom of that page about needing the epel repo's. But I didn't have it and installation when fine. After that installation the sound worked. And sounded just as it did using xmms. I added play ('file' => 'hello_from_bruce.wav'); to the if statement in my_test.pl and then when I pressed the test button in the web page I got a print statement "set to 1" and the wav file played.