[orca-list] Ubuntu Studio: Orca, Apps, Sound and Locales

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila mail student oulu fi>]

Hi,
As one of my big reasons of not yet going with LInux is availability of 
accessible MIDI seq, soft synth and audio editing apps, I've been following 
Ubuntu Studio with curiousity. But before I try and see which apps are 
accessible and which not, and commit tens of gigs of disk space in a 
dual-booting setup, a crucial question or two:

1. Does Orca and Espeak come in Ubuntu Studio just like it comes with Ubuntu 
7.04? If not, can they be added and how, or is accessibility optimized away? 
I do know Ubuntu Studio is based on 7.04 bbut their site is down due to high 
demand and the Wiki lacks some coverage, so that's why I'm here.

2. Are there boot options for enabling a speech-based setup similarly to 
plain Ubuntu?

3. Which MIDI seqs, audio editors and such should I use, is, say, Audacity 
currently accessible using Orca?

4. two questions on speech synths. I have a multi I/O sound card. HOw do I 
determine to which out Espeak speaks, without changing the default device in 
Gnome? In Windows, some synths let you tweak that and others go with the 
default audio device. Also, any chance of getting prompts in English while 
the synth speaks Finnish? A sighted, local Linux guru demonstrated me Orca 
and the Feisty, but we didn't manage to get the prompts localized I.e. the 
English prompts were spoken in Finnish. There are no Finnish screen reader 
prompts currently, I guess I could localize given a simple enough file 
format, though I personally like to retain all prompt text in English 
regardless of the screen  text language.

As to what kind of apps I'm looking for, for your information, here are 
some:

- A sound FOrge clone: the best would be Audacity I guess and it uses 
WxWidgets so should be accessible, right?

- A QWS or sonar clone: Rose Garden was hyped, so is that GTK+ 2? If not, 
another LInux friend told Ardour will have MIDI soon and is GTK2 based. But 
can it host soft synths?

- Winamp equivalent: XMMS is not accessible so which one should I use if I 
need game music plugs?

I do realize these software queries are OT:ish here so feel free to ignore 
them or reply off-list.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila mail student oulu fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/