Wine sound discussion summary

[Robert Reif]

Francois Gouget wrote:
> Also, as far as I know, DirectSound works on top of all our 
> backend drivers.
>
>   
It works through the WAVE API on most drivers which
requires software mixing and format conversions.  Even
the direct sound drivers only implement a single
hardware buffer which means that even direct sound
goes through the software mixer and format conversions.

If any direct sound driver implemented multiple buffers
of any format, there would be no software mixing done
in the direct sound dll.  Everything would just pass through
the direct sound dll directly to the driver untouched.  We
would also get multiple open support since it wouldn't
matter which application the buffers came from.

OpenAL and pulseaudio probably have the capabilities to
implement a direct sound driver that supports multiple
opens and mixing of multiple streams of different formats
which would bypass the software mixing and format
conversion path in the current direct sound dll implementation
but I guess we will never know.  Unfortunately OSS and alsa
don't except under very limited conditions (if the drivers
implemented it which they don't).