[Wine] Why not pulseaudio?

[Gert van den Berg]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 22:02, gepomuk <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
> Pulseaudio works great in wine using the modified wine from the Neill Aldur ppa. Tried everything else (padsp, pasuspender, blah) and nothing would work reliably. Some crashes when another application outputs sound, sometimes the sound does not work at all, sometimes it is awfully slow or with latency varying while recording, leading to unpredictable offsets in recorded files.
>
> Using pulseaudio driver I can without problems play and record projects with cockos reaper, the latency is good enough for my home desktop (which is 6 years old!), and I can access and use every audiodevice I like within the reaper program. Even using one device for input and another for output works great! Without time offset between devices! This proves that wine with pulseaudio works really great (similar to asio4all on windows), and is only one patch away!

Whether it works is not the only thing determining whether it is
accepted into Wine... If you search the archive (maybe wine-devel as
well) you will find that the diver have serious code quality issues,
making maintenance hard... Having code that can potentially break due
to a small change in several place that is almost impossible to fix is
problematic...

> Frankly, pulseaudio is the only soundsystem in linux which seems user-friendly and reliable to me, while at the same time eating not too much processing power. Furthermore, it is the only one which for me "just works", without making me fiddle around with configuration files for weeks.

Pulse runs on top of ALSA / OSS... (This adds extra latency and hide
hardware features used by Wine for suipporting some DirectSound
features)

> So: why is there this childish boycott of wine developers against pulse? I would rather stop using wine and reinstall windows than abandon pulseaudio. Even after working on my several linux machines for years now. Does developing wine necessarily include ignoring all technical progress? Pulseaudio won't just disappear just because wine doesn't support it, it rather seems to become the standard for desktop users. Wake up guys!
>
If Pulseaudio's ALSA / OSS emulation was not broken, it would not have
been necessary to port every single application to support it. Wien
works OK in many cases on top op Pulse...

> Very annoying also is the inability of winecfg to save audio configurations "per application", because there is no midi support in the pulse driver. So I have to maintain two .wine dirs, one for pulseaudio applications and one for midi stuff. Why that? :cry:

Wine works a lot better using a separate WINEPREFIX for every
application... search it. When starting applications from the GUI it
is transparent, initially setting it up takes a bit more effort...
(Google it...)

Killing pulseaudio used to work for me under Ubuntu 9.04. Have'nt
bothered trying to get rid of it on newer versions (it does restart
automatically though)

AFAIK, there is work being done to port Wine's audio to run on top of
OpenAL... (Have a look at the WWN issues on the homepage)

Gert