Wine and DirectSound (Was: Bug Triage: Get Games working)

Molle Bestefich molle.bestefich at gmail.com
Sun Oct 2 10:13:00 CDT 2005


Molle Bestefich wrote:
> What doesn't work: Sound.
> I've got kernel 2.6 with 1000Hz timing fidelity on a 2+GHz machine,
> and there is an awful scratching noise in every sample.  That goes for
> both the Starcraft music (played off the CD) and the sound effects.
> The fullscreen video displays without any hickups, and the problem
> occurs even when the game is idle.  So it's definitely not a CPU
> problem but a bug in Wine's DirectX audio implementation.
>
> In addition to the scratching noises, all sound effects are cut off
> (faded, it even sounds like ??) prematurely.  It's not a lot, but it's
> definitely audible that all sound effects are chopped in the end, so
> to speak.

Using Winamp with out_ds.dll (DirectSound), it seems that sounds also
start scratching endlessly after doing a couple of "Play/Pause" cycles
here.

Also noticeable while doing play/pause is that Wine's DirectSound is
not going a very good job, perhaps with mixing, I'm not sure.  When
starting playback, it does one of several things, but only at the
start of playing:
 - Leaves out samples
 - "supersamples" (?) stuff, eg. sound volume doubles
 - Decrease (half?) sound volume

Output with out_wave.dll seems to suffer some of the same problems,
albeit they are harder to reproduce:

When starting a sound, a miniscule 'scratch' sound or slightly
loudened volume might be heard for a split second, but almost always
go away instantly and so is almost inaudible.

Some times, though, it *does* output overlapping sound samples for a
prolonged period of time, just like DirectSound does all the time
(when/because of some odd fading technique ?).

What it _doesn't_ have is the eternal scratching noise that Wine
DirectSound has, which is of course a relief :-).

The audible hiss in DirectSound seems to be
http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2211.

Can't find any mention of the DirectSound mixing (?) problems, neither
of the WaveOut ones (albeit they are less of an issue).



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