Too much latency for a publisher working with sound_play

edit

Alhough I am not 100% sure, the latency might come from both ROS' sound_play and also festival. Even though sound_play assures that it can handle multiple play request simultaneously, I had difficulty that caused a problem when trying to handle multiple requests within very short interval (ticket opened).

One workaround worth trying is to use festival (or other native player) directly. For example for text2speech, do something like this.

process = subprocess.Popen(['festival', '--tts'],
                           stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
                           stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                           stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
stdout_value, stderr_value = process.communicate(spokenTxt)
process.wait()

For playing audio file, using mplayer is an option if you're on Ubuntu. These worked out for us well (although certain interval b/w each play was necessary to guarantee the proper execution and the sound quality).