Wine sound discussion summary

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr> wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Dec 2009, Reece Dunn wrote:
> [...]
>> If Wine is going to go down the Windows 7 audio route, why not
>> redirect everything to pulseaudio?
>
> Is PulseAudio supported on Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris?
> If not then we'd need an alternative for these platforms.

PulseAudio is around on FreeBSD and Solaris but not on OSX.

> That's also something that worries me a bit about OpenAL. It's meant to
> be portable but I wonder how well it's supported and integrated with
> each of these platforms. Note that this worry is in part caused by
> ignorance, that is I don't know that it's widely used and works well on
> all these platforms.
>

OpenAL was designed by Loki and Creative as a cross-platform API.
Since the fall of Loki Creative has continued it and also Apple has
added it to OSX. The original opensource implementation which was used
in Linux games didn't receive any (or else little) updates from
Creative. In the end Chris has cleaned up the last Windows version of
OpenAL and maintains it as 'OpenAL soft'. Officially Creative leads
OpenAL but they don't seem to disclose specifications of improvements
and extensions they have added. They don't seem to bother keeping all
implementations in sync. Chris has added a lot of improvements to
OpenAL soft and has defined new extensions. I have no idea to what
degree other implemenations of OpenAL will pick up these changes and
what the quality of the (closed) OSX branch is. It would be good if
OpenAL became a real cross-platform standard again (for instance
coordinated by Khronos who maintain OpenGL and other standards).

Roderick