wine users - Sep 2011 - lotro - no sound or options alsa/wine 1.3.27

Pre wine version 1.2.26 sound worked fine in lotro and the in game audio 
options page showed the sound card in a dropdown box and titles for all 
of the sound option slide bars.

In 1.3.26 and now 1.3.27 there is no sound in game and the audio options 
window does not show any sound card or titles for the sound options or 
various volume slider bars and all of the bars are set at minimum. The 
bars can be raised but doing so does not change anything.

wine version 1.3.27 install from openSuse 11.4 repos
winecfg audio tab settings: alsa driver, hardware acceleration = full 
(tried on emulation as well with, no change to sound.), default sample 
rate = 44100, default bits per sample = 16.

hitting the 'test sound' button on the winecfg audio tab plays sound in 
both full and emulation hardware acceleration options but does give the 
error:

fixme:mixer:ALSA_MixerInit No master control found on HDA NVidia, 
disabling mixer
fixme:alsa:AudioClient_GetMixFormat Don't know what to do with 10000 
channels, pretending there's only 2 channels
fixme:alsa:AudioClient_GetMixFormat Don't know what to do with 8 
channels, pretending there's only 2 channels
fixme:alsa:AudioClient_GetMixFormat Don't know what to do with 8 
channels, pretending there's only 2 channels
fixme:alsa:AudioClient_GetMixFormat Don't know what to do with 8 
channels, pretending there's only 2 channels
fixme:alsa:AudioClient_GetMixFormat Don't know what to do with 8 
channels, pretending there's only 2 channels
fixme:alsa:AudioClient_GetMixFormat Don't know what to do with 10000 
channels, pretending there's only 2 channels

I'm not sure how to tell if those are ignorable fixmes or are part of 
the problem.

I have checked through my graphic software management tool (yast) and 
could not find any parts of pulseaudio installed and I also checked by 
command line to remove anything pulse*.* and pavu*.* so I do not think 
there is a pulseaudio conflict lurking on the system. The machine is KDE 
by default and I have tried to keep it gnome free to avoid conflicts.

Google searching showed a similar issue on the game forum which was 
fixed in windows by renaming the "userpreferences.ini" file found in
"my
documents" -> "the lord of the rings online" folder and
restarting the
game so a new .ini was created. Doing so did not change anything for me.

A page on the Codeweavers site says for their set up using alsa and no 
pulse should work fine, but I do not know how well that applies to wine  
(http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/cat/?app_id=2869;tips=1) (in 
the FAQ section of the page under 'lotro has no sound (linux)).

Does anyone have ideas of where or what else I can check, change or test?

tparker wrote:
> Does anyone have ideas of where or what else I can check, change or test?
Post terminal output from running the game.

The only part that uses QT is pylotro itself, which is a python launcher for the
game, since the native game launcher is .net based and doesn't work in wine.
Those errors are pylotro specific have nothing to do the game itself at all.

And the splash/loading screens are indeed not downloaded by pylotro, but they
are loaded by the native launcher. The loading screens can be manually
downloaded and installed from http://www.mcgillsociety.org/PyLotRO/index.html
but have no effect on game play (or audio).

I just recently realized I didn't have sound either in DDO (same engine as
LOTRO), and the fix for me was setting Windows 2000 in winecfg instead of
Windows XP. Let me know if that works for you.

I had the same problem with DDO (running on Kubuntu with Audigy2 sound card)
after the last update. I found two different solutions:

1) In the wine libraries settings, use native openal32 rather than builtin.
Then, some sort of generic playback device appears in the audio settings of DDO.
The voice chat does not seem to work, though.

2) Leave openal32 at builtin, and install pulseaudio instead. Then, the full
plethora of sound devices (pulseaudio, a bunch of alsa devices and even oss)
appears in the audio settings of DDO. The voice chat works in this case, if an
appropriate capture device is chosen.

I believe the problem is in the interaction between the turbine game engine and
wine's openal32. Why the problem is remedied when pulseaudio is installed,
is beyond me.

You are welcome. I'd like to clarify that pulseaudio is needed solely for
the list of sound devices to appear in the audio settings of DDO/Lotro - you
should of course choose alsa's devices for capture and playback, as
pulseaudio is not supported by wine. Which makes this whole business look rather
creepy - why would one need to install an unsupported software for the supported
software to be displayed.