Sound in Wine has been a big issue.  From a user’s perspective, it didn’t work well.  From a technical user’s perspective, there were 3 different drivers to choose from and none of them worked well.  From a developer’s perspective, no sound driver would ever work well.

Wine was a victim of the proliferation of sound drivers on Linux.

At one point, Wine had separate sound drivers for ARTS, ESD, OSS, JACK, and ALSA.  None of them worked right, even if the user could figure out how to configure Wine to use the “correct” one.  Subtle changes to each API and differences between distribution versions made matters even worse.

PulseAudio was supposed to be a solution to problems like this by being the one true Linux Sound System, but in some ways it made the problem worse.  Now Wine needed a separate PulseAudio sound driver, and no one wanted to write sound driver code since the whole thing was a big mess to begin with.  Worse, the most work had gone into making the ALSA driver better, and there were a few technical reasons why it seemed like a good choice to stick with ALSA and use it as a default.*

So, the decision was made to go with ALSA and improve it a bit, and hope that PulseAudio’s ALSA-compatibility layer would work well enough.  That didn’t exactly happen – PulseAudio didn’t actually want to support some “abuses” of the ALSA API, as one dev put it.  Some users took to killing PulseAudio outright every time they wanted to use Wine.

Things got a bit political.  Was Wine at fault here, or PulseAudio?  Should Wine include a PulseAudio driver, even if it was poorly maintained?  What would the default be?  Also, what the hell were we gonna do about the Mac?

The solution, which in retrospect is pretty obvious

                                   

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ReactOS tank 2009-12-28 03:19:57 ReactOS is solution to everything in future Reply | Quote 0   0

Tom Wickline 2009-12-28 06:26:56 Tank, it's almost New Years not April Fools.. :P Tom Reply | Quote 0   1

Nick 2009-12-28 09:12:21 OpenAL is good choice. Reply | Quote 0   0

OSS4 hash 2009-12-28 10:58:05 I'd say to go with ALSA and OSS4. PulseAudio is a mess in first place, and it is working not in Linux way, thou ALSA to not in that way but it's at least works most of the time. Reply | Quote 0   0

Pulse+ESD plue 2009-12-29 02:18:54 PulseAudio also emulates ESD by default. Wine ESD driver together with PulseAudio works fine. So for me is the current solution without killing any daemon. Reply | Quote 0   0

PA isn't so bad William 2010-01-30 22:09:01 Wine has enough on their plate trying to get the Windows stuff down. Linux sound servers suffer the same way the distros have: people can't agree!  It's features, performance, licensing. It seems to me PulseAudio has a slight lead, being default on a number of major distros now. But they still have a long way to go to work out the bugs. It works for me using Mandriva 2010, Wine->OSS->PulseAudio. Unfortunately some Steam games don't work with that combination yet.  ...So I wait. Reply | Quote 0   0

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