* Summary Of ALSA Buffer Sizes For Outloud

  1. Under pure alsa -- ie until about Jun 2022, Emacspeak used an Alsa
   Audio buffer size that equated to 2048 audio samples and this
   worked well. Note that when you run the server at the shell, this
   is shown along with other audio setup info.
  2. In May 2022 I got my new laptop and finally bit the bullet and
   started using pulseaudio -- and the 2048 sample buffer size
   caused high latency under pulseaudio.
  3. So I reduced that to 512 samples, and this worked well under
   both pulse and alsa  --
  4. I am now running pipewire with no pulse  in the picture
   except for pulseaudio compat provided by pipewire and the
   512 sample size works well on my laptop.
  5. Basic thumb rule: smaller buffer == lower latency.
  6. I suspect  ChromeOS is not happy with such a small
     buffer,  (high-latency request) since that likely requests latency that the platform is
     unable to provide. Likely other reason: the underlying host OS ---
     ChromeOS --- has started the pipewire server with limits on latency
     one can request.
  7. I've updated the Outloud server in Git to return to the larger
   buffer size and it's working without issues on my Linux laptop --
   though my laptop didn't need the fix; but it might fix the issue
   on ChromeOS.
  8. The afore-buffersize is defined in
   [[https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak/blob/master/servers/linux-outloud/atcleci.cpp#L79][servers/linux-outloud/atcleci.cpp]].
