[Wine] Steam sound problem

[Susan Cragin]

>Jemain wrote:
>> I've got my sound working, but now its laggy where it was perfect before.
>> ubuntu karmic 9.10 wine 1.1.31
>
>If you haven't read it, I'll repeat: disable/kill/remove/uninstall pulseaudio. It's the source of all sound problems (and not only with Wine).

There may be problems completely removing pulseaudio in Karmic Koala. It's tied in too closely to the desktop environment. There are bugs about this, and I've complained bitterly. 
Many people hate pulseaudio, not just wine users, and have suggested making it an option. They have also switched to Ubuntu distros that don't include it by default, such as Xubuntu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio both have it. 

Here's what I do to run audio applications in wine. 
in terminal:
sudo nano /etc/pulse/client.conf
uncomment and change this line as follows:
; autospawn = yes
autospawn = no
(Otherwise killing pulseaudio has no effect, it just re-starts automatically.)

In terminal, every time you boot up, type:
killall pulseaudio

I have created a little script with a button on my taskbar to do this. Pushing this button and killing pulseaudio has become the best part of my day.