Comment 4 for bug 778619

This bugs seems to be similar to Debian bugs #638691 and #638369.
Ubuntu 11.04 shipped with alsa-utils 1.0.24 which introduced the pause functionality to
aplay (part of alsa-utils). This is consistent with the version of alsa-utils also breaking festival in Debian.
Upstream alsa project has a patch in their master to fix this change in aplay.
I have tested this patch on a broken festival Debian system and it restored the functionality.
Would an affected person be able to test this on Ubuntu?

I attach the patch which was added at the upstream alsa project by Takashi Iwai.
His discussion can be found at

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/85332

very best regards,
Peter
(Co-Uploader for festival on Debian as of last week)