[pulseaudio-tickets] [PulseAudio] #198: Alsa source and Wine

[PulseAudio]

#198: Alsa source and Wine
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  Reporter:  AdamK               |       Owner:  ossman  
      Type:  defect              |      Status:  reopened
  Priority:  normal              |   Milestone:          
 Component:  alsa-plugins-pulse  |    Severity:  normal  
Resolution:                      |    Keywords:          
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Comment (by coling):

 Replying to [comment:17 oiaohm]:
 > I am going to be blunt.   With wine we have got pulse working but slowly
 for everyone on alsa.  Its the how bit.

 Being blunt is fine. Making accusations with no evidence is not.

 Please back up your statements with examples. Making such statements on
 their own will not help people fix things!!

 > pasuspender does not work on all cards either for wine.   Reason if card
 has onboard hardware mixing it works.   If card needs software mixer dmix
 to replace that function it don't work.  pasuspender not smart enough to
 activate dmix in that case so its now a nice intermittent mess.  Working
 for some people and not for others.

 pasuspender is doing it's job fine. You presume that pasuspender should
 reconfigure alsa. It does not do this. All it does is tell the pulseaudio
 deamon to release the card. It does not reconfigure alsa. If you alsa
 configuration is such that the "default" device is routed to the pulse
 plugin, pasuspender will not touch this (it cannot do this as quite often
 the default config is specified by root, not the current user).


 > I think part of this mess is that you have miss read alsa.   Sound card
 drivers don't need to provide what dmix can do in software.  But since its
 software or hardware applications are build that dmix or hardware exists
 or if it does not exist user can enable it.

 Sorry but I don't really follow the above statement, can you clarify?
 Where has the alsa spec been mis-read? If you can point out where this is
 happening, perhaps we can fix it but a sweeping statement is pretty much
 just flame bait that is not particularly constructive :(

 Pulseaudio is effectively a replacement of dmix. It makes absolutely no
 sense to use pulseaudio on top of dmix. People often have some kind of
 strange attachement to dmix for no sensible reason other than "it's in
 alsa". So what? A modern linux OS is modular and the sound subsystem is no
 different. dmix is just a sound server itself, and pulseaudio is a better
 sound server. End rant :)

 > Us giving support for people using wine are currently forced to give
 recommendation to remove pulseaudio from system.  Reason we cannot get
 required performance threw pulse audio due to having to stack dmix and
 pulse to get things to work.  Then it all works with major performance
 issues.  Maybe a few minor registry key edits but works.

 Disabling PA seems to be the only way just now until the ALSA bugs are
 fixed (please follow up the alsa bugs on the alsa devel mailing list as
 this seems to be the best way to get the alsa people to commit the fixes).


 > Simple fix pulse audio stop blaming wine.  You have miss read the
 documentation.  You have not provided part of the needed feature set.  So
 now you have a stack of broken applications.  If stacking of dmix over
 pulse audio worked without speed issue this would not be a problem.

 Please stop making such statements without providing evidence of where the
 mistakes or bugs are. As I said above, without backing up your words you
 are just dishing out flame bait which I'm trying hard not to rise to.

 There are open bugs in the Alsa BTS that the alsa folks need to address.
 Werehamster has provided several patches which seem to help.

 The primary problem last time I looked was that Wine has misread the alsa
 specs in there use of the snd_pcm_delay() function. In fairness the docs
 are a little unclear and expose the implementation in the description.
 Wine assumes that this should return 0 when all the samples are played but
 this is not something the docs specify. Wine needs to find an alternative
 way to do this. I'm not sure how up-to-date my comments are here and Wine
 may have already fixed this problem in recent months. Certainly, the ALSA
 "bug" https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=3943 should
 probably be closed as not-a-bug/invalid. See the link to the mailing list
 discussion on in the bug report for background and the discussions we've
 had about this.

 As far as I'm aware the remaining bugs are:
  * https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=3942
  * https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=3944

 If the patches provided are not yet committed then someone needs to poke
 the alsa developers on the alsa devel mailing list.

 Please keep any further discussions on this topic on to the mailing list.
 I wont reply again on this bug in such away as Trac should not really be
 used like this. Please also do not post non-constructive comments -
 accusations are fine, provided you back them up!!!

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/198#comment:18>
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