[Wine]No Sound while playing games

[Holly Bostick]

siddharth seth wrote:
> Hi all
> I have been getting this really crazy problem while
> using wine. My wine version is 20050111. Last night I
> installed warcraft III and the games graphics and
> sound worked perfectly, no hassles at all.  Today when
> I restarted the game there was no sound. I fiddled
> around in the [WinMM] section of the config but
> couldnt get the sound back.
> 
> Today I installed Soldiers of Fortune. Played the game
> and everything again worked beautifully. Now when I
> try to play it again there is no sound. 
> 
> I am quite confused since there is sound when I play
> it the first time but subsequently no sound at all.
> All my other applications (with sound ) are working.
> Can some one tell me whats going on here. Obviously
> its got something to do with wine. 
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Sid
>  

Hi, Sid,

Actually, I can't see how it's got anything to do with Wine at all. If 
Wine played the sound properly on initial install of both games, then 
Wine's sound driver is working-- and Wine doesn't *change* anything all 
by itself between your executions of the program (afaik), so I don't get 
how Wine could be at "fault".

What I would suspect is the possible use of a sound server... 
Specifically the KDE sound server, aRTs. Now, "what I can think of" is 
not the same as "all that could be going on" (meaning, I am no expert), 
but the only combination of factors I can think of that might result in 
something like this happening is that

1) You use KDE and the aRTs sound server is running;

2) You have aRTs set (in the KDE Control Center=>Sound and Multimedia) 
set to stop automatically after a certain amount of inactive time;

3) You have Wine set to use the winearts sound driver.

My main suggestion is that if you are using winearts.dll, change your 
sound driver in Wine's config file to wineoss.dll (comment out winearts 
and uncomment wineoss). This fixed problems I was having with sound 
while using KDE, with aRTs running (which is why I thought I should use 
winearts.dll, but it appears this was wrong, as it did not work well at 
all). In fact, when I changed the Wine sound driver to OSS, I didn't 
even have to change anything in the KDE Sound and Multimedia section, 
which I thought I would have to do (either stop aRTs, or uncheck the 
stop automatically blah blah blah checkbox). However, the Wine OSS 
driver works perfectly without any further modifications to any config.

Hope this helps, otherwise please give us more information as to what 
your setup is in terms of sound hardware, desktop, and Wine sound 
configuration.

Holly