Wine and PulseAudio

[Tomas Carnecky]

Jan Zerebecki wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 01:50:09AM +0100, Tomas Carnecky wrote:
>> nifty features, like per-app volume, transparent sink switching
>> etc, some of which are impossible to emulate through the alsa
>> pulse plugin.
> 
> Which features can't be used through the alsa->pulse plugin? And
> is there any technical reason for that or just missing
> functionality in that plugin?

All wine apps are identified as 'ALSA plug-in [wine-preloader]' in the 
PA daemon, so you can't set per-app volume and sinks since all wine apps 
show up under the same name. That is a technical limitation of the alsa 
plugin and can't be fixed (well, unless the plugin does some /proc/self 
voodoo to extract the true name). However that does not make the plugin 
unusable, but per-app settings is a major functionality of PA, so it's 
kind of bad if that doesn't work.
I have gotten winealsa to work with a patched alsa pulse plugin, but 
whether my patch will be accepted remains uncertain. There are some 
fundamental differences between ALSA and PA, for example ALSA uses 
frames and PA uses microseconds and I suspect there are rounding issues 
involved that make winealsa hang in certain situations. I'll need some 
help from the PA developers to fix that, but so far it's been quite 
difficult to get hold of them.

tom