Update on speech/media sounds

[Linux for blind general discussion]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2021, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:

> I wrote an email here earlier asking about setting a USB card for speech and having my media playback come through the onboard sound card. There does not really seem to be a reliable way of doing this without pulse.

Apologies, I don't think I saw the original question.

I've not needed to use Pulse.

Assuming you are using speakup with espeak and espeakup, you can use the 
ALSA_CARD environment variable to tell espeakup where to play audio.

Debian takes this one step further by having it definable in 
/etc/default/espeakup

Here's what it says:

# To choose audio output on another sound card, uncomment this and set as
# appropriate (either a card number or a card name as seen in CARD= alsa
# output).
#
# export ALSA_CARD=0

I have used this successfully on a multi-card machine, though not with 
USB.

Note that I've also had issues using some USB cards which do not support 
the sampling rate that espeak expects to use.

HTH,
Geoff.