pocketsphinx microphone connection is unreliable
Hi, I have pocketsphinx installed with hydro and raring ubutu (13.04). I've done the standard installation with gstreamer0.10-pocketsphinx, ros-hydro-pocketsphinx, ros-hydro-audio-common and libasound2.
When it works, it works quite well and will run for hours. However, often when I start it up, it does not respond to the microphone at all. The microphone is still working according to the Sound Settings input page, but pocketsphinx just doesn't seem to receive the input. After it has been running properly, I can just stop it with control C and start it again and it may or may not work properly. No changes are made between stopping and starting it.
I assume that the mike data is getting lost somewhere in the gstreamer connection; but troubleshooting this connection is out of my experience. Online search has many examples of problems in this area, but none of the proposed solutions seem to help. I found gstreamer-properties which seems to allow selection of pulseaudio and my specific microphone; but doesn't make any difference.
Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks, Alex
A few generic points to help troubleshooting. Compare top results when the bug happens and during normal operation. See if there is a process taking more time. Also, it might be that some process went to sleep mode, like a power save feature.
Well, what I could see is that PulseAudio %CPU goes up about 50% (10% go 15% roughly) when pocketsphinx is working. I read up on PulseAudio and added some of the tools which made me think I had it fixed. But it went back to not working after 8 or 10 restarts. I'm going to follow up on MIke's answer below.