•Speech dispatcher, that is the „old” british Festival sys. in practice/as Linux read-aloud system LIB.: the system's server SEEMS to regurarly open ALSA audio device in an EXCLUSIVE mode.

I can't figure out ALSA internal details, but what I know:

 »»EFFECT 

: Mplayer w/o sound

»»Command-line issued after some operating of Festival program: 

 "speaker-test -c 2" — that brought 

"buffer to small, could not use
Setting of hwparams failed: Invalid argument"