[Bug 10495] Wine should support PulseAudio

wine-bugs at winehq.org wine-bugs at winehq.org
Tue Jun 16 20:05:44 CDT 2009


http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495





--- Comment #104 from Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com>  2009-06-16 20:05:22 ---
(In reply to comment #100)
> In my opinion http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18740 is not a DUPREC of
> this message and hence should be reopened.
> 
> This message here is about getting a PulseAudio driver in Wine.

The original post was, but it has also become related to getting winealsa to
talk to pulse better, hence the DUPLICATE.

> Force the people to switch of PulseAudio until PulseAudio supports the complete
> ALSA API flawlessly is not an option. You should really read 
> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/guide-to-sound-apis.html 
> to understand that this will never happen.

Blogs are not generally good references for unbiased information on any
subject, however there is some very interesting information in this article.
1) "PulseAudio is not useful in professional audio production environments."
2) "I want to do professional audio programming, hard-disk recording, music
synthesizing, MIDI interfacing! Use JACK and/or the full ALSA interface."
3) "I want to write audio software for the plumbing layer! Use the full ALSA
stack."

Wine has to be able to provide a professional-quality audio system for those
apps and users who need it. Though this does not impair the inclusion of a
pulseaudio driver for those who *don't* need professional audio, point #2
implies that Pulseaudio support will be crippled or insufficient even for more
common tasks.

I also suspect that Wine fits into the #3 category. Remember that Wine is not a
regular application but a compatibility layer between win32 and Unix-likes. By
definition, it does weird stuff.

> Once Wine uses the known save ALSA API and there are still problems with
> PulseAudio I'm sure that the colleagues from PulseAudio are willing to iron out
> the remaining issues.

Once someone proves that it is even possible for Wine to use *only* the safe
ALSA API for everything (ideally with patches), this might be a valid point to
argue.

> PulsAudio is the most important sound system on contemporary LINUX systems. It
> doesn't end with Mandriva, Fedora and Ubuntu. ESD e.g. is virtually dead.

Pulseaudio is NOT the most important sound system on Linux; ALSA is (some would
argue OSS is, but they usually mean OSS4 which is not included in kernel
upstream). You couldn't have sound daemons without the ALSA (or OSS) drivers
and (in the case of ALSA) the userspace libraries supporting them.

ALSA is guaranteed (barring user fiddling) to be installed with software mixing
capabilities superior to Pulseaudio (as in not restricting to the "safe" ALSA
call subset) on all Linux systems. OSS is virtually guaranteed to be available
on other Unix-likes (coreaudio for MacOSX, I believe). Pulseaudio is still at
best an optional extra for most, and probably should still be optional for
everyone using Mandriva, Fedora and Ubuntu due to the number of problems with
the architecture.

Pulseaudio is a return to the ancient, pre-dmix-by-default architecture of
driver + daemon (that produced the now dead esd and arts daemons) to provide
software mixing to cards that don't have hardware mixing. It SHOULD have been a
drop-in replacement for dmix, but it's far from it.

Long post. Short version is: Pulseaudio driver is unsuitable until it's proven
to be both possible (with *FULL* audio support) and needed (i.e. winealsa can't
be improved sufficiently to talk to plug pulse better).

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