SpeakFreely, Software TTS And ALSA

In ALSA and ASYM I mentioned that speakfreely appeared to have stopped working. As it turns out, this had nothing to do with the switch to ASYM. I believe that in the past I had run speakfreely by first killing software TTS --- since by default speakfreely uses OSS.

Getting speakfreely working with ALSA without losing software TTS required the following steps;

1. Retrieve the latest tarball speak_freely-7.6a.tar.gz
2. Uncomment the ALSA specific line in its Makefile
3. In file audio_alsa.c, change the default audio device from plughw:0,0 to default. Without this change, speakfreely will try to access the sound card directly; setting it to default on line 41:

   char *devAudioOutput = "default";
   

   matches things up with the pcm.default that was configured in the .asoundrc.

With this, you can now talk using speakfreely and continue to use software TTS.