[Bug 10495] Wine should support PulseAudio

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495





--- Comment #122 from Stefan Dösinger <stefandoesinger at gmx.at>  2009-06-17 07:09:13 ---
(In reply to comment #120)
> LINUX/Unix sound system will basically consist of the following elements:
>  - ALSA/OSS for hardware access
>  - PulesAudio for desktop sound server
>  - JACK for low latency professional needs
> 
> Many issues with PulseAudio are already fixed or they are in work:
>  - Coexistence of JACK and PulseAudio is one of the topics e.g. Fedora is
> working on. 
>  - KDE 4 just learn to use PulseAudio with Phonon
>  - many latency issues are actually kernel issues
I am not the one who designs the Linux sound APIs, but there are number of
flaws in this approach:

*) If I want gaming(a low latency audio application) I don't want to do
something manually to get it. PulseAudio on a default Ubuntu setup gets me
about 300 milliseconds latency. That is enough to make Tuxracer not fun. You
can't have 5 solutions for 5 different applications. You need one solution for
all of them. Windows can do it. MacOS can do it.

Likewise Wine users should not have to configure manually whether they want low
latency(alsa plugin) or software mixing(pulse plugin). There has to be one
solution for all.

*) Low latency audio in multiple apps worked with Alsa + Dmix. Before Pulse
arrived, I could listen to my MP3s and play Counter Strike, and actually hear
gunfire before I was dead. PulseAudio is a network daemon, which cannot get low
latency by design without realtime hacks. Blaming that on kernel issues is the
wrong way to work around design flaws IMHO.

*) If you write an app that claims it has a compatibility layer for Alsa, and
50% of the apps out there need adjustments(KDE, Skype, Wine, apparently even
Tuxracer), then the compatibility layer is not actually compatible.

*) PulseAudio is like the 15th sound API on Linux. All the reasons cited why
PulseAudio is good were cited for ESD and Arts before. I am still not convinced
why Pulse is suddenly going to fix all that. ESD and Arts were dropped for good
reasons. For a while SW mixing was done by dmix, until people went back in time
and reinvented ESD and Arts under a different name.

/me anticipates the same flamewar in one or two years when Wine urgently needs
to support, say, SpeedAudio, which will be the definite solution to all sound
issues on Linux.

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