[Wine] No sound in World of Warcraft - intermittant.

[JontomXire]

At first I thought it was due to running Mangler simultaneously, but recently we've had no sound in World of Warcraft.

One night when I was setting up to raid that night, I started WoW, and sound worked fine. I then quit WoW, started Mangler, started WoW, had sound in the first but not the second. When WoW started this dialogue box popped up saying that a change in hardware had been detected and asking if I wanted to reset to default settings - I selected "no".

I then quit WoW, quit Mangler, then restarted just WoW. I got the dialogue box again, and sound was working once more.

I then quit WoW, and started Mangler then WoW. No dialogue box and sound was working fine in both.

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This weekend, my wife and I were playing WoW, and she was on the Linux box, we hadn't run Mangler at all. She complained that there was no sound. Later that night I couldn't get sound to work at all. I tried running with Mangler and without Mangler, I tried rebooting, I even overrode the automatic device detection in winecfg to select the analogue sound device rather than the digital one.

Nothing worked.

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Lastly, I'd just like to say that when I test the sound in winecfg, it always works fine. I always hear the test sound, regardless of whether Mangler is running or not, regardless of whether WoW has sound or not, the winecfg program always plays sound correctly.

So I'd say the problem seems to be that sometimes Wine presents a sound device to WoW, and sometimes it doesn't. Hence the "hardware changed" dialogue. I have noticed that a number of times, but since I don't play on that PC I never really noticed a problem with sound before, and my wife isn't the complaining sort, so she didn't tell me much either.

Between crappy graphics, dodgy sound, and difficulty getting the 8 mouse buttons to work the way they used to, I'm seriously considering going back to Windows. I really really don't want to, but it's my wife plays on that computer, not me, and I think she's getting a bit hacked off at how badlyWoW is running. As I posted in another thread, since I last had Windows running on there, I have upgraded motherboard, CPU, and RAM significantly, but the graphics is worse now than it was before, when I feel sure that all the upgrades should make it much much better. All graphics settings are at the lowest level yet the game is barely playable, slow and jerky. If I can't get sound to work reliably soon then I am going to go back to Windows and kiss goodbye to Linux. Blame the games programmers who only write games for Windows.