[Espeak-general] asynchronous library for windows with portaudio sound

[Jarek C. <jar...@po...>]

The windows dll library built by current version of espeak was difficult 
to use. It was not outputting any sound by itself and did not handle 
asynchronous mode. I managed to get over these problems and currently I 
have a library with functionality similar to this built under Linux. It 
made it possible to run emacspeak on Windows with espeak as a speech 
server. Now I would like to submit my patches to espeak to make it 
commonly accessible.

The first thing I would like to fix is portaudio dependency. Currently 
under platforms\windows\windows_cmd we have a file PAStaticWMME.lib. It 
may be built from portaudio sources. What do you think about removing 
this file from source repository and replacing it with a source equivalent?

Corresponding source code could be included in espeak or only a 
suggestion that a portaudio library should be built or downloaded from a 
different place. These places mentioned there.

The question is which portaudio to use. When I used the included lib 
file, I experienced hangs, resulting from portaudio busy flag. It was 
somehow not cleared. When I compiled trunk version r1910 from 
https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/portaudio/portaudio/trunk, the 
problem was no longer visible.

There is a general problem in espeak windows files. Their contents is 
duplicated in 3 directories and there is no Makefile for mingw. I 
compile espeak library using mingw based mainly on src directory 
(targetted at Linux). The most significant change was defining 
PLATFORM_WINDOWS and USE_ASYNC. So I thing that mingw could use the 
standard source files.

I would like to help in restructuring espeak windows files to overcome 
the mentioned difficulties. But I can't do it without your guide. What 
directories should be removed, what added etc. I hope we will be able to 
work out a solution and finally make it possibly to quickly produce a 
library with mingw.

Kind regards
Jarek