Wine sound discussion summary

[Reece Dunn]

2009/12/7 Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>
>
> On Sun, 6 Dec 2009, Reece Dunn wrote:
> [...]
> > If Wine is going to go down the Windows 7 audio route, why not
> > redirect everything to pulseaudio?
>
> Is PulseAudio supported on Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris?
> If not then we'd need an alternative for these platforms.

http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/AboutPulseAudio#SupportedOperatingSystems:
    * Linux (any modern distribution)
    * Solaris
    * FreeBSD
    * NetBSD
    * Native Win32 (no cygwin)

They do have Mac support in progress (see the mailing list --
"pa_fdsem racy?"), but there are some issues at the moment.

> That's also something that worries me a bit about OpenAL. It's meant to
> be portable but I wonder how well it's supported and integrated with
> each of these platforms. Note that this worry is in part caused by
> ignorance, that is I don't know that it's widely used and works well on
> all these platforms.

Stefan said that there were some issues with the OpenAL support on
Mac, and that there are some bugs on that platform (as well as bugs in
the Linux driver). However, there are bugs and issues whichever API is
chosen (alsa, oss, pulseaudio, openal, ...).

The way I see it, each choice has its own advantages:
   alsa/oss/coreaudio -- midi support; direct access to audio driver
   jack -- low-latency performance needed for wavert interfaces
   openal -- 3d sound effects (dsound 3d); flexible backend
   pulseaudio -- user-space audio mixing and application-based volume
configuration; flexible backend

- Reece