Wine and PulseAudio

[Jan Zerebecki]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 12:05:46PM +0100, Tomas Carnecky wrote:
> All wine apps are identified as 'ALSA plug-in [wine-preloader]' in the 
> PA daemon, so you can't set per-app volume and sinks since all wine apps 
> show up under the same name. That is a technical limitation of the alsa 
> plugin and can't be fixed (well, unless the plugin does some /proc/self 
> voodoo to extract the true name). However that does not make the plugin 
> unusable, but per-app settings is a major functionality of PA, so it's 
> kind of bad if that doesn't work.

I'm not sure if /proc/self is the right way to implement this but
in some way it should be made possible with the alsa->PA plugin.

(Why isn't the changed process name used, that is also shown by
ps? Perhaps it should be implemented by using a environment
variable and/or argument to the alsa->PA plugin, that would also
allow the following feature?)

Does PA (when used "directly") also always use the original
process name? I imagine I'm not the only one who would want to
have a bit more configurability there (some processes with the
same executable should probably not share the same settings and
the other way around).

> I have gotten winealsa to work with a patched alsa pulse plugin, but 
> whether my patch will be accepted remains uncertain. There are some 
> fundamental differences between ALSA and PA, for example ALSA uses 
> frames and PA uses microseconds and I suspect there are rounding issues 
> involved that make winealsa hang in certain situations. I'll need some 
> help from the PA developers to fix that, but so far it's been quite 
> difficult to get hold of them.

We should really get those things that are wrong in either
winealsa or PA fixed. (Assuming the PA developers are interested...)

AFAIK bug #10942 and at least the part of bug #10910 about "Could
not find 'PCM Playback Volume' element" are things that need
fixing in winealsa.


Jan