wine users - Jun 2010 - Why not pulseaudio?

Pulseaudio works great in wine using the modified wine from the Neill Aldur ppa.
Tried everything else (padsp, pasuspender, blah) and nothing would work
reliably. Some crashes when another application outputs sound, sometimes the
sound does not work at all, sometimes it is awfully slow or with latency varying
while recording, leading to unpredictable offsets in recorded files.

Using pulseaudio driver I can without problems play and record projects with
cockos reaper, the latency is good enough for my home desktop (which is 6 years
old!), and I can access and use every audiodevice I like within the reaper
program. Even using one device for input and another for output works great!
Without time offset between devices! This proves that wine with pulseaudio works
really great (similar to asio4all on windows), and is only one patch away!

So, for my home recording I will of course use pulse (jack didn'n work at
all on 3 machines with 4 different distribitions including ubuntustudio during
several years, meanwhile the most recent version works on one kubuntu machine
after days of configuring but recognizes only 2 of 6 outputs, so won't
anyone tell me to use this crap!)

Pulse is also the only way to get sound from all outputs of my soundblaster
audigy as well as the possibility to switch between 5.1 and stereo upmix. In
Alsa I can _either_ have upmix _or_ play sound with more than one application at
a time, and even working through the configuration mess .asoundrc took me weeks
until recognizing this fact. This is quite archaic, even windows 95 soundsystem
had no problems like that.

Frankly, pulseaudio is the only soundsystem in linux which seems user-friendly
and reliable to me, while at the same time eating not too much processing power.
Furthermore, it is the only one which for me "just works", without
making me fiddle around with configuration files for weeks.
So: why is there this childish boycott of wine developers against pulse? I would
rather stop using wine and reinstall windows than abandon pulseaudio. Even after
working on my several linux machines for years now. Does developing wine
necessarily include ignoring all technical progress? Pulseaudio won't just
disappear just because wine doesn't support it, it rather seems to become
the standard for desktop users. Wake up guys!

Very annoying also is the inability of winecfg to save audio configurations
"per application", because there is no midi support in the pulse
driver. So I have to maintain two .wine dirs, one for pulseaudio applications
and one for midi stuff. Why that? :cry:

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 22:02, gepomuk <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
> Pulseaudio works great in wine using the modified wine from the Neill Aldur
ppa. Tried everything else (padsp, pasuspender, blah) and nothing would work
reliably. Some crashes when another application outputs sound, sometimes the
sound does not work at all, sometimes it is awfully slow or with latency varying
while recording, leading to unpredictable offsets in recorded files.
>
> Using pulseaudio driver I can without problems play and record projects
with cockos reaper, the latency is good enough for my home desktop (which is 6
years old!), and I can access and use every audiodevice I like within the reaper
program. Even using one device for input and another for output works great!
Without time offset between devices! This proves that wine with pulseaudio works
really great (similar to asio4all on windows), and is only one patch away!
Whether it works is not the only thing determining whether it is
accepted into Wine... If you search the archive (maybe wine-devel as
well) you will find that the diver have serious code quality issues,
making maintenance hard... Having code that can potentially break due
to a small change in several place that is almost impossible to fix is
problematic...
> Frankly, pulseaudio is the only soundsystem in linux which seems
user-friendly and reliable to me, while at the same time eating not too much
processing power. Furthermore, it is the only one which for me "just
works", without making me fiddle around with configuration files for weeks.
Pulse runs on top of ALSA / OSS... (This adds extra latency and hide
hardware features used by Wine for suipporting some DirectSound
features)
> So: why is there this childish boycott of wine developers against pulse? I
would rather stop using wine and reinstall windows than abandon pulseaudio. Even
after working on my several linux machines for years now. Does developing wine
necessarily include ignoring all technical progress? Pulseaudio won't just
disappear just because wine doesn't support it, it rather seems to become
the standard for desktop users. Wake up guys!
>
If Pulseaudio's ALSA / OSS emulation was not broken, it would not have
been necessary to port every single application to support it. Wien
works OK in many cases on top op Pulse...
> Very annoying also is the inability of winecfg to save audio configurations
"per application", because there is no midi support in the pulse
driver. So I have to maintain two .wine dirs, one for pulseaudio applications
and one for midi stuff. Why that? :cry:
Wine works a lot better using a separate WINEPREFIX for every
application... search it. When starting applications from the GUI it
is transparent, initially setting it up takes a bit more effort...
(Google it...)

Killing pulseaudio used to work for me under Ubuntu 9.04. Have'nt
bothered trying to get rid of it on newer versions (it does restart
automatically though)

AFAIK, there is work being done to port Wine's audio to run on top of
OpenAL... (Have a look at the WWN issues on the homepage)

Gert

> AFAIK, there is work being done to port Wine's audio to run on top of 
> OpenAL... (Have a look at the WWN issues on the homepage) 
> 
This. Let's wait and see how the new OpenAL-based system works out. It's
supposed to greatly simplify the audio core and increase compatibility as well
as just support programs like PulseAudio.