[Emacspeak] Pipewire And Emacspeak

[T.V Raman <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pipewire got auto-installed on my laptop this week and the next reboot
lost most audio, here are some fixes and next steps:

1. The hardest thing about this breakage is that it does not happen
   when pipewire gets installed on a running system; it only breaks at
   the next reboot (or likely the next relaunch of your X desktop ---
   not clear).

   2. In my case, the immediate fix was to delete my .asoundrc ---
      interestingly, before I did that I observed:

      A. Emacspeak's TTS working on the Notification Stream but not on
         the main TTS stream (I still dont understand why)

         B. Espeak (ie the espeak-ng executable, not the Emacspeak
            speech server) was also failing to produce TTS when called
            from the shell.
--=20

3. After deleting the .asoundrc file, things became somewhat usable:

   A. Emacspeak --- both the main TTS stream and Notification stream
      started speaking reliably

      B. Auditory icons worked

         C. There was some slightly perceivable latency in audio

            D. Sound settings via  emacspeak-audio-setup were using
               values in the 0..65536 range --- which is typically a
               symptom of pulseaudio having taken over the audio
               device ---note that in that instance, alsa output gets
               routed through Pulseaudio
F. Soundscapes (via boodler) did not work, since Boodler writes
   directly to alsa.
  =20
               4. The pipewire auto-install on Debian installs
                  packages pipewire, pipewire-media and pipewire-pulse
                  --- note that final package is basically bridging
                  pipewire back to pulseaudio for backward
                  compatibility -- and then depending on pulseaudio to
                  bridge alsa compatibility which is where things are
                  getting messy.

                  5. I uninstalled the pipewire modules:
                     sudo apt-get purge pipewire pipewire-media
                     pipewire-pulse
                     and restarted the desktop from a shell with
                     sudo service lightdm restart
                     and logged back in.

                     5. Now things wer back to normal with volume
                        settings as before (on my laptop master volume
                        is 0..88), and boodler for soundscapes started
                        working again.


Further reading on the Web shows that distros like Arch Linux provide
a pipewire-alsa package --- and I suspect that that package might get
everything working without needing to entirely nuke pipewire; a quick
read also shows that pipewire might add value long-term as opposed to
pulseaudio which has mostly added nuisance value over the last few
years.

Given the need to restart one's environment to test and debug this,
I'm not going to get to this in the foreseeable future; if you have  a
pipewire based system and can experiment with pipewire-alsa, please
follow-up to this thread with what you discover.

--Raman=20

Thanks,

--Raman(I Search, I Find, I Misplace, I Research)
=E2=99=89 Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  =F0=9F=A6=AE

-- 

Thanks,

--Raman(I Search, I Find, I Misplace, I Research)
♉ Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  🦮