SoC idea: improve dsound/winmm

[James Hawkins]

On 4/21/06, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems
> which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer
> underruns and high latencies in games.
>
> For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards.
> None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the
> issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa
> driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too.
>
> In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's
> bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts.
>

The only problem I have with this project idea is the ambiguity of
'improve dsound/winmm'.  At what point is dsound and winmm considered
to be improved?  It would be nice to see a list of specific items that
need to be fixed, and I mean more specific than crackling playback and
high latencies.  A specific project that would probably help with this
situation is to combine all wine audio drivers into one driver,
wineaudio.  The common functionality of the drivers can be factored
out, reducing code size while at the same time minimizing the chance
for more bugs.

--
James Hawkins