Getting Sound to work on ROS

I was following the ROS.org wiki on trying to setup sound for it’s not immediately obvious to a n00b how to do this.

Installing sound

sudo apt-get install ros-diamondback-sound-drivers

Then I could start the tutorial correctly.

Then due to some weirdness with alsa and ubuntu asoundconf

wget http://ubuntu.mirror.cambrium.nl/ubuntu//pool/main/a/alsa-utils/alsa-utils_1.0.15-3ubuntu2_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i alsa-utils_1.0.15-3ubuntu2_i386.deb
sudo cp /usr/bin/asoundconf /usr/
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo cp /usr/asoundconf /usr/bin/

You now have a copy asoundconf in /usr/ to use

I could then run:

asoundconf is-active
asoundconf set-default-card 0
sudo cp ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf /etc/asound.conf

This generated errors when running asoundconf but the sound-play scripts ran properly.

rosrun sound_play soundplay_node.py
rosrun sound_play say.py "hello world"

soundplay_node.py was reporting “no sound card found” but then went on to say, “ready to play”

Text to speech worked okay.

Installing extra voices

Install a British English male voice rather than the default American one.

sudo apt-get install festvox-rablpc16k

I haven’t yet looked at how to set this as the default voice.

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