[pulseaudio-discuss] Moving sources and sinks

[Tomas Carnecky]

Colin Guthrie wrote:
> Tomas Carnecky wrote:
>> Colin Guthrie wrote:
>>> I disagree that this community is unresponsive. You just have to be
>>> patient. Lennart is the main developer but he does not sit slavishly
>>> reading the mailing list and responding immediately. He'll usually have
>>> a big purge every couple weeks, but generally does respond to almost
>>> everyone who asks something, unless someone else has jumped in already.
>> PulseAudio + Wine is still a big no-no. Like described in my earlier 
>> mail to this mailing list (sent 24.2.2008) I've come to a point where I 
>> don't know any further and asked for help. Nobody answered. Not even to 
>> the ticket in PA trac or the ticket in the alsa bugtracker.
>>
>> Ubuntu now ships with PA enabled by default, which causes big troubles 
>> for those wanting to play games under Wine. I know the best solution 
>> would be to have a native PA driver in Wine, but that won't happen 
>> anytime soon. There are bugs in the pulse alsa driver. Fixing those 
>> shouldn't be such big problem for someone familiar with the inner 
>> workings of PA.
> 
> What are the bugs in the pulse alsa plugin you refer to? There are some
> feature limitations but they are typically down to what any ioplug
> plugin is capable of.

https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2601 (see the 
comments made by wereHamster, that's me).

http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/198

> When I last looked at the wine alsa layer it was *really* nasty. It
> didn't even open the "default" device, it would instead try to open
> "default:0".... I think it was cleaned up a bit, but it should be very
> simple for someone to rewrite it or write a direct pulse driver. The
> main wine folks don't use PA so don't really care about this.
 >
> If there is something in pulse that can be fixed, it shoudl be reported,
> but as tonnes of apps out there work fine with pulse+alsa, I suspect
> strongly (and this is based on actually having a quick peak at the code
> a while back) that the problems lie at the wine end.

There may be applications that work fine, but you only have to find a 
single app that works with native alsa and fails with alsa-pulse 
emulation to prove that there's a bug in your code. Wine is probably one 
of the more complex users of the alsa API, and therefore exposing bugs 
in alsa-pulse that other applications don't hit.

I have patched the Wine alsa driver and the alsa-pulse plugin and sound 
works for me, tested in World of Warcraft and foobar2000. The Wine patch 
maybe isn't necessary. But the patch to alsa-pulse is required, see my 
comments in the alsa bugtracker or the PA ticket.

tom