[Wine] Playing Games with Wine while listening to music

[James Huk]

2009/6/16 Dark Mayu <wineforum-user at winehq.org>

>
> jorl17 wrote:
> > Hi, what's your distro?
> >
> > More importantly, do you use a mixer? Do you use OSS or ALSA? (check
> winecfg).
> >
> > That's probably due to the fact that Wine gets direct access to the hw
> (or semidirect, through, say, OSS).
> >
> > I, myself, use Alsa with Pulseaudio enabled.
>
> Thanks for your reply, Distro's Kubuntu 8.10 64bit(sorry, forgot to mention
> that before). I'm using the Alsamixer since it's the only one which works
> properly. Wine is configured to use OSS, otherwise, sound doesn't want to
> work properly(giving an error if you run an win app via terminal, something
> like "couldn't find audio"). Kubuntu's default audio player is Amarok. It
> can be configured to use OSS or Alsa, but every setting has the same effect:
> as soon as I run Amarok with music, any win app won't have any sound.
> Pulseaudio however gave me an idea, I'll try some settings within winecfg
> and post the results later.
>
>
>
> The problem is that OSS doesn't have software mixer – at least not the old
OSS (there is OSS v4 – but Linux use ALSA instead). This was a major problem
in the past, because on Windows you could run as many apps as you wanted and
sound played perfectly with every of them (even on cheap or integrated
cards), while on OS-es that used OSS... you could run only one app at the
time.

There are some card that support “Hardware mixing” - this feature means that
we are able to send multiple streams directly to the card and its hardware
will mix it for as (examples of such cards are: all cards using EMU10k1/10k2
chipset (SB Live! (NOT Live! 7.1),SB Audigy (NOT Audigy SE) or Aureal
Vortex), however with newer cards this usually isn't the case – even
equipment like Asus Xonar doesn't support hardware mixing and this is rather
expensive card (don't know about Creative X-fi though...).

That's why software sound daemons and mixers were created (ESD, ARTS and now
Pulse Audio), however most of this “mixers” were either abandoned quickly
(ESD) or were depended on other things (ARTS depend on KDE) hence they were
not usable outside their designed environment, and of course application
developers needed to write multiple code implementations for every one of
them... that was (and still is in some cases) pain in the butt. That's why
ALSA developers created dmix – software mixer, first versions were rather
buggy, and required manual edition of some files – but right now dmix is
pretty good and for most cards it works “out of the box”. Unfortunately...
dmix cannot handle OSS directly (even thou OSS is really “emulated” thought
ALSA) so if some app try to use OSS, no other apps will be able to get
access to sound device (unless you have card with hardware mixer). In other
words – all apps you use should be set to use ALSA and all mixers like Pulse
Audio or ARTS should be disabled. Then it should work.

Using aoss isn't really a good idea – this wrapper usually doesn't work good
with wine and this is yet another abstraction layer (another layer=another
problems). I recommend you try fixing ALSA problems (probably something is
using your card, and that's why “No sound card found” or similar errors are
being shown).
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