[Xastir] Playing sounds

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 01:24:55PM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kc7zru at kc7zru.net> flavor, containing:
> On Tue, July 10, 2007 11:27 am, Earl Needham via Kubuntu wrote:
> >
> > 	Uh -- somebody send me a clue how to get sounds to play in Xastir.  I'm
> > trying to get new station announcement, etc., to play, and I don't know
> > th esyntax.  Apparently play with nothing else doesn't do it!  <G>
> >
> > 	Thanks,
> > 	Earl
> > --
> > Earl Needham KD5XB
> > Clovis, New Mexico DM84jk
> > ZUT
> > _______________________________________________
> > Xastir mailing list
> > Xastir at xastir.org
> > http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
> >
> 
> 
> File > Config > Audio Alarms
> and
> File > Config > Speech
> 
> But, for speech to work, you'll have to have compiled in festival support
> and started the festival server *before* you start Xastir.
> 
> festival --server & <enter>

In more detail:

There are two ways to get xastir to do sounds. One is synthesized speech, 
which requires festival, and the other is just playing static sound files 
(Audio Alarms).

In order for Audio Alarms to work, you need to tell xastir what program to use 
to play the audio files.  I believe that the default is some program that is 
not available on the default Kubuntu install (I think it's "vplay" and I've yet
to touch a system that had it).  You just need to replace that in the 
Config->Audio Alarms dialog's "Audio Play Command" box with something that 
actually exists and works from the command line.

I am not near my Ubuntu machine, so I can't check, and I never use the audio
alarms so I don't have it configured.  I think if you install a 
package called "esdtools" or "esdclients" you can use "/usr/bin/esdplay" 
instead.  esdplay interacts with the esd daemon that should already be running
on your system and allows multiple programs to access the sound system at once.
Before you expect Xastir to work with esdplay, you need to try it out from
a command line and see if it plays a sound file.  E.g. 
"esdplay /usr/local/share/xastir/sounds/newstation.wav" should play a 
sound "New Station!" if all is working.

Of course you also need to download the sound files that Xastir will look for.  
They're available on the xastir sourceforge download page.

But if you want synthesized speech, start the festival daemon and make sure 
Xastir is built with that support.  I prefer the synthesized speech to the
static audio files, but I rarely enable it  because it gets annoying really
fast unless you're using it for somethign specific.  The synthesized speech
option does not require that you download any sound files.


-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick