why pulse (WAS: Update on speech-dispatcher and pulse)

[Aleksandar Kostadinov]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 11:32 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> BTW, has Canonical approved your proposal to work on SD? Really hope so,
>>> that'd be a great and much-needed project, particularly if it can be gotten
>>> working with Pulse.
>>
>> Why is it so important for everybody SD to work with pulse, if it is
>> working fine with ALSA !?
>
> Because that is the default sound system on both Fedora and Ubuntu.
> While pulse does offer a alsa emulation layer it adds issues/delays
> itself, or if SD gets the lock on the alsa device before pulse does
> the user might not get any other sound. It also adds support for other
> audio devices such as bluetooth headsets, and dynamically routing
> desktop speakers to audio headsets or back when they get unplugged.

All sound devices are handled by alsa. It's bad that alsa doesn't have
a good GUI configuration because I believe it can pretty much replace
a sound server nowadays. But what you say to some extend is done *by
default* by alsa already.

I'm trying to understand if the crashes are seen with pure alsa as
well. If not then configuring for alsa can make current pulse users be
able to use SD much more conveniently. As well will identify to some
extend the culprit of the crashes. Personally I'd like to know the
best reliability of SD that can be achieved so I decide whether there
is a chance to make it work for my wife. I certainly will not ask her
to restart it few times an hour (and she would not accept if I did).

Actually yesterday I made Bulgarian working with SD and orca and I
found it working fine. But I used it only for 10 minutes so I can't
say it is stable enough. Again I'd like to know it's reliability from
actual users before I jump in configuring a very complex system.

Best Regards