[Wine] Re: Pulseaudio

[vitamin]

Oli Warner wrote:
> The most infuriating part of all this is there is a patch here that provides working audio under all circumstances without any additional set up.

I question this part. That "magic patch" has number of holes.

It implements only winmm subsystem and has no additional acceleration for dsound. Because it was modeled after old version of wineoss driver not winealsa. And because dsound acceleration is much more complicated because it requires some features not present in pulse.

The question here is - why would Wine need to add an additional layer to it's sound subsystem, when it has already properly functioning lower level drivers? Not one, but 2! Which would never go away (OSS is a standard used on lots of other *NIXes and ALSA is _the_ sound driver system in Linux). BTW look at other sound servers that pulseaudio replaces - ESD and ARTS. And where are they now? Wine had more-less working drivers for those (arts driver was removed, esd hasn't been touched for ages). 

All sound servers had (and still do) lots of added features at the cost of sound latency, performance, limited availability (does pulse work on Sun? Mac?), and limited low-level access. For example none support mmaped buffers, which result in extra memory duplication and extra copying of sound buffers.