Wow, that works great!

I installed that kernel and replaced the old pcmplay with your patched version. CPU time isn't a problem! I'm quite impressed! While playing mp3s, I can have it read text (using ttsd 1.0a2 which is 16KHz flite). There's about 3 seconds delay after I hit enter before it says "hi" and that seems just fine to me.

Seems like a well-planned feature that the audio is mixed in such a way that the music softens when the speech is playing and then restores back to normal. I'd guess that's just what happens when you add two waveforms together and divide by two, but it sounds like a well-written feature

Two problems though One is: after intalling the patched kernel, my display is all snowy (the left side is animated snow in time with the music). Doesn't seem to effect anything else though (buttons work fine, telnet and ftp work fine).
The other is that after speaking, the music returns to the volume it was at, but a second later, ups to max volume. Ticking the volume knob up or down at all restores it to where it should be, is it possibly just a side-effect of the same bug that's messing up the display?

With the patched kernel and pcmplay, ttsclock gains the same benefit. It can tell the time without causing the music to skip.