[nvda] Re: USB eSpeak

I could never get portaudio to function correctly in cygwin. I don't even think it... no hang on, I think it would compile, but when I tried running any program that used it it gave some weird error with the library. I really can't remember, but really, I think the best thing is to try to compile a native windows version of the ESpeak library, and we can work out some way of playing the waveforms ourselves.
But, what is most important is that we need to be able to easily compile the ESpeak library in to a dll so that Python can use it with ctypes (or we could swig it, but I don't know much about that).
Jonathan, I know you once told me that perhaps we could just use the espeak sapi5 dll directly. However I had a look at all the functions it exports and they really are quite cryptic, as it is really supposed to be used via com.
It would be great if we could compile the ESpeak library under cygwin in mingw32 mode (as in no depending on cygwin1.dll) but I think to do this well ESpeak source will need to be cleaned up a bit and perhaps use autoconf and automake etc so that its much easier to make on various systems, including cygwin.
I would prefer not to have to use a Visual Studio project, though of course I understand it was easier to do that for the sapi5 driver since that is very specific to Windows.
The GNU tools such as automake and autoconf etc do support dlls, and especially when using libtool it does make things quite a bit easier.
I havn't looked at the source for quite a while, but the last time I tried to compile just the library, I had to edit the makeFile so it didn't try linking against portaudio etc.
Perhaps I can have a look at the source again and see how hard it will be to write some autoconf templates etc, it would be worth it if it could be done. 

Mick
----- Original Message ----- From: "James Teh" <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 1:03 PM
Subject: [nvda] Re: USB eSpeak



Jonathan Duddington wrote:

The AUDIO_OUTPUT_SYNCHRONOUS mode works OK (that's what the SAPI5
version uses).  The asynchronous AUDIO_OUTPUT_RETRIEVAL mode should
work if you have Posix Threads available.

> You'll need to deal with
> playing the buffers of sound WAV data ...
We could probably do this in a Python module if we can get espeak to show up in Python. Hmmm. 

> unless you use the

AUDIO_OUTPUT_PLAYBACK mode which should work if the portaudio library
is available (www.portaudio.com, it's supposed to run on Windows).
Mick, you mentioned some problems with portaudio in Windows, but I completely forget what they were. Can you enlighten me? There was some reason you struggled with it ... 

Jamie

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