portaudio backend was Re: Pico module doesn't work with alsa

[Luke Yelavich]

On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 05:57:02AM AEST, Chris Brannon wrote:
> Luke Yelavich <luke.yelavich at canonical.com> writes:
> 
> > There is an alternative through the use
> > of libao, however in my experience, using libao with either its alsa
> > or pulse backends has some annoying latency.
> 
> Has anyone investigated the possibility of a portaudio backend?
> I've found portaudio to be extremely reliable with espeak over the years.

It would kill a few birds with one stone, namely ALSA and OSS. We still need 
OSS for the BSD family I think...

> In all honesty, the ideal situation would be one audio backend, say
> portaudio, which could indirectly support all of the audio subsystems.

I'd suggest 2, portaudio and pulseaudio, as portaudio doesn't support pulse so 
far as I know, and that is not likely to change. I have longer term plans for 
closer integration with pulseaudio anyway, so it may make better sense to 
support pulseaudio more directly. PulseAudio could also solve the network use 
case, thereby allowing the NAS code to be considered as deprecated and dropping 
later on.

> The main reason is code shrinkage.  I'm sure there's code in Speech
> Dispatcher's audio libraries that has not been touched in years and
> years.  Yes, nas.c and oss.c, I mean *you*!

...and alsa.c. :)

> Code that isn't there is code that doesn't have to be maintained.  Since
> it isn't there, it is provably free of bugs!

Agreed. :) I think this is worth considering, as it also gives us jack support 
for free, for those who want to use jack.

Luke