This sounds like it's caused by portaudio V18, which uses the OSS sound system, which can only by used by one program at a time. Portaudio V19 can use the ALSA sound system and can mix sounds from multiple sources. I believe eSpeak on Ubuntu is built to use portaudio V18.
Ubuntu could perhaps build eSpeak to use PortAudio V19, and also include the PortAudio V19 library in main? It should be possible for both V18 and V19 of PortAudio to be present, since V19 names its library as libportaudio.so.2 rather than libportaudio.so.0. However there is a problem with PortAudio V19. I noticed when I tried using eSpeak with PortAudio V19 from the command line, eg: espeak "hello" that there was a loud click and a short pause before speaking, every time I did the command. I don't know whether this effect depends on particular sound hardware. -- No speech in totem using eSpeak w/ Orca https://launchpad.net/bugs/84220 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
