ViaVoice (98) in Wine

[René Rebe]

Hi all,

over the weekend I tried to get ViaVoice (98) running in Wine (20050524). The 
installation goes smooth - even the embedded videos how to handle the 
microsfone, etc. are displayed ,-)

However after the installation some "audio setup" tool is run to adjust the 
mixer level and maybe more like capture channel. This tools does just print 
an error that it can not find "mixer elements / devices" (translation from 
the german text I had on screen).

I tried a few install and wine config variations, including switching from OSS 
to ALSA - however without success.

I then tried to copy my trained profile from a real Windows box in order to 
skip this audio setup stuff. However the real applications then also complain 
about no mixer found. Capturing from my mic with some "proof of concept" and 
tiny audio recorder as shipped with ViaVoice (snwave.exe IIRC) did work.

Injecting all the windows partition content into the wine folder did also not 
help.

Are there some holes in some kind of mixer interface implementation? Is there 
some kind of tracing I can enable in order to take a look what kind of call 
did fail?

Any help appreciated.

Yours,

-- 
René Rebe - Rubensstr. 64 - 12157 Berlin (Europe / Germany)
            http://www.exactcode.de | http://www.t2-project.org
            [phone]

I had similar probs with Dragon Naturally Speaking.

The GUI setup method kept complaining. I was able to get around one issue  
by finding the utility that did the setup (gentrain.exe) and running that  
under wine directly. That fixed that one nicely.

I would stay with ALSA plus oss-emulation on your linux system.

I would favour a clean VV setup on wine rather than copying the whole lot  
because there will inevitably be some filenames , device names , reg  
settings etc that are not there on you wine installation.

If you know you have working audio capture as you say, try to find  
something in the ini files and trick it into thinking you have run the  
setup.

HTH , keep us posted.



On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 08:49:50 +0200, René Rebe <rene(a)exactcode.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> over the weekend I tried to get ViaVoice (98) running in Wine  
> (20050524). The
> installation goes smooth - even the embedded videos how to handle the
> microsfone, etc. are displayed ,-)
>
> However after the installation some "audio setup" tool is run to adjust  
> the
> mixer level and maybe more like capture channel. This tools does just  
> print
> an error that it can not find "mixer elements / devices" (translation  
> from
> the german text I had on screen).
>
> I tried a few install and wine config variations, including switching  
> from OSS
> to ALSA - however without success.
>
> I then tried to copy my trained profile from a real Windows box in order  
> to
> skip this audio setup stuff. However the real applications then also  
> complain
> about no mixer found. Capturing from my mic with some "proof of concept"  
> and
> tiny audio recorder as shipped with ViaVoice (snwave.exe IIRC) did work.
>
> Injecting all the windows partition content into the wine folder did  
> also not
> help.
>
> Are there some holes in some kind of mixer interface implementation? Is  
> there
> some kind of tracing I can enable in order to take a look what kind of  
> call
> did fail?
>
> Any help appreciated.
>
> Yours,

[René Rebe]

Hi,

On Monday 06 June 2005 09:33, wino(a)piments.com wrote:
> I had similar probs with Dragon Naturally Speaking.

That means you have it running and in "every day use"? Which version do you 
use?
> The GUI setup method kept complaining. I was able to get around one issue
> by finding the utility that did the setup (gentrain.exe) and running that
> under wine directly. That fixed that one nicely.

Well - as I wrote: When I copied my trained model data from windows (just the 
c:\ViaVoice\users\rene - no registriy stuff ...) The ViaVoice application did 
no longer wanted to run the audio setup - but complained it does not see 
mixer elements itself - so I assume the registry will not help me - since 
ViaVoice "engine or frontend applicatoins" want control about the volume 
mixer elements itself ...
> I would stay with ALSA plus oss-emulation on your linux system.

Yes, of course I run ALSA and OSS emulation ,-) - but do you also propose to 
use Wine's ALSA backend? That one seems not work as well as the oss backend, 
at least on my workstation ...

Yours,

-- 
René Rebe - Rubensstr. 64 - 12157 Berlin (Europe / Germany)
            http://www.exactcode.de | http://www.t2-project.org
            [phone]

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hi,
> I had similar probs with Dragon Naturally Speaking.
>
> The GUI setup method kept complaining. I was able to get around one issue
> by finding the utility that did the setup (gentrain.exe) and running that
> under wine directly. That fixed that one nicely.
> I'm just curious: Does Dragon Naturally Speaking also work with native Linux 
> programs if it's running under Wine, or does it only work with other wine 
> programs?

Stefan

I got NS v4 to work pretty much as effectively as it does under win98.  
That's to say pretty good but not great.
> =V5 is much better at speach rec. , I have got it to install correctly  
> but the training is now integrated and I have not found a work around  
> like I did for v4

I put the project on hold because I had more important things demanding my  
time but I intend to come back to this because NS 5/6/7 is really  
effective and I want this on Linux.

It will not magically work integrated with other software as it does on  
windows but the principal function of being able to dictate into it  
"dragonpad" text editor is the main hurdle and it works.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems each wine program is a completely  
separate thread so I dont see a likelyhood of off-the-shelf interprocess  
communtication like under windows.

However, it should be possible to grab the output going to dragonpad and  
pipe it to input of another linux prog. I did dabble with it enought to  
convince myself it was possible but no more.

Hopefully that covers Rene's qu as well

Regards.



On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:54:52 +0200, Stefan Dösinger  
<stefandoesinger(a)gmx.at> wrote:
> Hi,
> > I had similar probs with Dragon Naturally Speaking.
> >
> > The GUI setup method kept complaining. I was able to get around one  
> > issue
> > by finding the utility that did the setup (gentrain.exe) and running  
> > that
> > under wine directly. That fixed that one nicely.
> > I'm just curious: Does Dragon Naturally Speaking also work with native  
> > Linux
> > programs if it's running under Wine, or does it only work with other wine
> > programs?
>
> Stefan

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 08:49:50AM +0200, René Rebe wrote:
> Are there some holes in some kind of mixer interface implementation? Is there 
> some kind of tracing I can enable in order to take a look what kind of call 
> did fail?
> Probably (despite Robert Reif and others having done a lot of good work there). 
> Try
> WINEDEBUG=+driver,+winmm,+mmio,+mmsys,+sound,+mmtime,+mciwave,+msacm,+wavemap,+wave,+midi,+mixer,+mmaux,+dscapture,+dsound,+dsound3d
> (whoa, that's about 3 times longer than expected! ;)

and maybe also with +relay if needed.

Andreas Mohr

[René Rebe]

Hi,

On Monday 06 June 2005 09:34, Andreas Mohr wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 08:49:50AM +0200, René Rebe wrote:
> > Are there some holes in some kind of mixer interface implementation? Is
> > there some kind of tracing I can enable in order to take a look what kind
> > of call did fail?
>
> Probably (despite Robert Reif and others having done a lot of good work
> there). Try
> WINEDEBUG=+driver,+winmm,+mmio,+mmsys,+sound,+mmtime,+mciwave,+msacm,+wavem
> ap,+wave,+midi,+mixer,+mmaux,+dscapture,+dsound,+dsound3d (whoa, that's
> about 3 times longer than expected! ;)

Oh - thanks. I already tried WINEDEBUG and wondered that I got no output and 
just realized that my wine was compiled with --disable-debug ... ,-)

So with a rebuild wine the most obvious hint in the log is:

warn:mixer:MIX_Open The sound card doesn't support rec level

Hm ... - might be the ALSA OSS emulation ... this is most probably what 
ViaVoice is missing. However I just noticed the error message is different 
when I use OSS instead of ALSA. With OSS ViaVoice complains:

"Can not use Audiomixer for sound playback"

while with ALSA it complains:

"No active mixers"

Is it possible that ViaVoice does want to use some Windows Mixer program to 
playback sound?
The alsa backend seems to have some more problems:
ALSA lib control.c:739:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL plug:hw:0
ALSA lib control.c:739:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL plug:hw:1

Which I think happens since ALSA returns an infinite amount of channels and 
such for the plug:hw:* and wine does use one of thoe values to setup the 
card. When I patch it to use hw.* I can playback audio from Wine and do not 
get the above errors.

Yours,

-- 
René Rebe - Rubensstr. 64 - 12157 Berlin (Europe / Germany)
            http://www.exactcode.de | http://www.t2-project.org
            [phone]

I really dont know how stable/usable it is just yet but the new alsa-1.09*  
does now include software mixing

I tried 1.09-rc3 and had a few oddities so I decided to wait , it is now  
at 1.09a, may be worth a look if you sticking point revolves around  
missing mixers.

Regards.

On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 11:57:50 +0200, René Rebe <rene(a)exactcode.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Monday 06 June 2005 09:34, Andreas Mohr wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 08:49:50AM +0200, René Rebe wrote:
> > > Are there some holes in some kind of mixer interface implementation?  
> > > Is
> > > there some kind of tracing I can enable in order to take a look what  
> > > kind
> > > of call did fail?
> >
> > Probably (despite Robert Reif and others having done a lot of good work
> > there). Try
> > WINEDEBUG=+driver,+winmm,+mmio,+mmsys,+sound,+mmtime,+mciwave,+msacm,+wavem
> > ap,+wave,+midi,+mixer,+mmaux,+dscapture,+dsound,+dsound3d (whoa, that's
> > about 3 times longer than expected! ;)
>
> Oh - thanks. I already tried WINEDEBUG and wondered that I got no output  
> and
> just realized that my wine was compiled with --disable-debug ... ,-)
>
> So with a rebuild wine the most obvious hint in the log is:
>
> warn:mixer:MIX_Open The sound card doesn't support rec level
>
> Hm ... - might be the ALSA OSS emulation ... this is most probably what
> ViaVoice is missing. However I just noticed the error message is  
> different
> when I use OSS instead of ALSA. With OSS ViaVoice complains:
>
> "Can not use Audiomixer for sound playback"
>
> while with ALSA it complains:
>
> "No active mixers"
>
> Is it possible that ViaVoice does want to use some Windows Mixer program  
> to
> playback sound?
> The alsa backend seems to have some more problems:
> ALSA lib control.c:739:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL plug:hw:0
> ALSA lib control.c:739:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL plug:hw:1
>
> Which I think happens since ALSA returns an infinite amount of channels  
> and
> such for the plug:hw:* and wine does use one of thoe values to setup the
> card. When I patch it to use hw.* I can playback audio from Wine and do  
> not
> get the above errors.
>
> Yours,

[René Rebe]

Hi,

On Monday 06 June 2005 11:57, you wrote:
> while with ALSA it complains:
>
> "No active mixers"

Hm - looking into the winealsa source, mixer support seems to be absent.

Using OSS I found an ViaVoice engine log containing:

AudMME: Set Audio Input --------------------------------- [Jun 06 12:29:1 
2005]
    Using record device # 0 which is a Analog Devices AD1980
    AUDMME will use device # 0 for recording
    AUDMME will use device # 0 for playback 
    PCM Device               WAV Audio Adapter
       Default Record Device WAV Audio
     Default Playback Device WAV Audio Adapter
    acmDriverDetails failed, rc = 5
    acmDriverOpen failed, rc = 5
    acmDriverDetails failed, rc = 5
    acmDriverOpen failed, rc = 5
    Alphabet/Language/Codepage: R Gr_GR 850

a returncode of 5 seems to be:

#define MMSYSERR_INVALHANDLE  (MMSYSERR_BASE + 5)

I attached a not too big log of:

WINEDEBUG=+winmm,+msacm wine SpeechBar.exe -- -L Gr_GR

Maybe someone has an idea whats wrong.

Yours,

-- 
René Rebe - Rubensstr. 64 - 12157 Berlin (Europe / Germany)
            http://www.exactcode.de | http://www.t2-project.org
            [phone]