Comment 7 for bug 354522

Using the Ubuntu 9.04 beta live-cd, I found that doing the command:
espeak "hello world 1 2 3 4 5"

produces what sounds like very fast garbled speech on one computer occasionally, but always (every time) on another.

On the computer where the fault occurs always, I then changed to the Kububtu 9.04 beta live-cd and added the same eSpeak and portaudio files (Kubuntu doesn't include eSpeak on the live-cd). The problem did not occur with Kubuntu 9.04.

I also added the same eSpeak and Portaudio files to the installed version of Linux (Kubuntu 8.04) and the problem did not occur.

So it seems that this problem occurs in Ubuntu 9.04 beta, but not if the same eSpeak and Portaudio files are copied onto Kubuntu 9.04 beta, or Kubuntu 8.04.

Is this a clue?

On Kubuntu, I did notice a click sound at the start of some speech (depending on the initial word) when using the eSpeak which is compiled to use libportaudio.so.2 which does not occur with eSpeak which uses libportaudio.so.0. For example:
espeak -veo "e".

It is not present if the eSpeak speech is output to a WAV file (espeak -w out.wav -veo "e"). This may be related, or it may be a separate problem with eSpeak/portaudio/alsa.