[Bug 11764] Add support for multi-channel audio

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11764

Adam Bolte <boltronics at gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |boltronics at gmail.com

--- Comment #13 from Adam Bolte <boltronics at gmail.com> 2011-01-03 03:36:28 CST ---
I've spent most of today looking into this. All testing was against wine
1.3.10.

My system uses a Gigabyte X58A-UD9 MB with on-board Realtek ALC889 sound
connected to a Logitech Z-5500 5.1 system via analogue, and I'm running Ubuntu
10.04.

Under the Sound Preferences Hardware tab, I have selected "Analog Surround 5.1
Output".

When I run the command “speaker-test -c6 -l1 -twav” everything plays exactly as
expected. I've also added the following line to my /etc/pulse/daemon.conf file
to disable channel remixing:

enable-remixing = no

Otherwise it's not always immediately obvious if games are actually supporting
multi-channel or not. Additionally, my bare-bones ALSA config file redirects
everything to PulseAudio by default.

I've mostly tested games with ALSA selected in winecfg, but tried a couple of
games with the WinePulse patches and using PulseAudio directly to see if it
made a difference. It didn't.

The results:

In Portal, selecting 5.1 reverts back to stereo after freezing for a few
seconds. Selecting a multi-channel sound configuration is not possible (sounds
like the Team Fortress 2 report above).

StarCraft 1 certainly didn't output anything to my rear channels, as expected
from previous comments here.

StarCraft II, looked promising (I can select 5.1 from the drop-down
successfully) but it actually seems to do nothing (no audio was heard from the
rear channels). I tested as much as the menus and game cut-scenes.

UT2004 and Killing Floor (a UT2004-based game) also didn't run multi-channel,
even after adjusting some of the audio settings in-game.

Aliens Vs Predator was only stereo, and doesn't provide an option to tweak
anything useful audio-related in-game.

Despite all these failures, Unreal Tournament 3 multi-channel audio actually
worked effortlessly. You can clearly hear menu click sound effects in the rear
speakers, and surround sound in-game appears to work perfectly (I played a few
matches to test it out – using the patch for bug 6971 of course).

Given that UT3 worked, I tried Stranglehold (UT3-based), but that *didn't*
work. There wasn't much in the way of in-game options there. Perhaps if I had
more time I could try diff'ing the UT*.ini and Stranglehold ini files... don't
know.

I've got plenty of other games I could try, but that's it for now. Very curious
to know what's so special about UT3. Either way, it would be awesome to improve
multi-channel sound compatibility. I personally don't care about EAX.

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