title: Festival audio device problems. No sound output
body: <p>I currently have festival 2.4 installed and configured.</p>
  
  <p>Heres what I'm doing:</p>
  
  <p>I first use <code>./bin/festival</code> to get into the festival prompt.<br>
  Then do <code>(SayText "test")</code> which should have the tts speak the word test</p>
  
  <p>Now when I have festival 2.1 installed using apt-get from the repository this command works as expected, it says "test"<br>
  However when running from manually-built festival 2.4 it reports no error, but also no sound. I have used set parameter commands and tried every audio method, also tried the set parameter command with <code>Audio_Device</code> and tried many of the devices from /dev/ and /dev/snd/ on my system to no avail.</p>
  
  <p>Note that oss-compat is installed, I saw that listed as a solution somewhere and it was already installed from when I built cmu sphinx a while back.</p>
  
  <p>My question is what is apt-get doing that I'm not. I've been at this for about 12 hours now so any ideas are welcome.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong>: I have used strace to monitor the calls festival is making to the system in an attempt to find out whats causing this, heres what I've come up with:</p>
  
  <p>My system has multiple audio deivces connected to it, the integrated audio on the motherboard which is fried, the hdmi outputs of the nvidia card, and a usb audio device I'm using for the time being. <code>ls /dev/</code> shows three audio devices, as expected <code>/dev/audio</code>, <code>/dev/audio2</code>, and <code>/dev/audio3</code>. Setting festival to use the first two with <code>(Parameter.set 'Audio_Device "/dev/audio")</code> did the same thing as before, no error but also no sound. However when using the third device <code>/dev/audio3</code> I get <code>Linux: can't open /dev/audio3</code> upon further investigation with aforementioned strace I discovered this:</p>
  
  <p><code>open("/dev/audio3", O_WRONLY)           = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy)</code></p>
  
  <p>I searched around a bit and the only mentions of this error I can find are for specialized cases for whatever the person in question was doing.</p>