Wine and PulseAudio
tom at dbservice.com
Sun Feb 24 05:05:46 CST 2008
Jan Zerebecki wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 01:50:09AM +0100, Tomas Carnecky wrote:
>> nifty features, like per-app volume, transparent sink switching
>> etc, some of which are impossible to emulate through the alsa
>> pulse plugin.
> Which features can't be used through the alsa->pulse plugin? And
> is there any technical reason for that or just missing
> functionality in that plugin?
All wine apps are identified as 'ALSA plug-in [wine-preloader]' in the
PA daemon, so you can't set per-app volume and sinks since all wine apps
show up under the same name. That is a technical limitation of the alsa
plugin and can't be fixed (well, unless the plugin does some /proc/self
voodoo to extract the true name). However that does not make the plugin
unusable, but per-app settings is a major functionality of PA, so it's
kind of bad if that doesn't work.
I have gotten winealsa to work with a patched alsa pulse plugin, but
whether my patch will be accepted remains uncertain. There are some
fundamental differences between ALSA and PA, for example ALSA uses
frames and PA uses microseconds and I suspect there are rounding issues
involved that make winealsa hang in certain situations. I'll need some
help from the PA developers to fix that, but so far it's been quite
difficult to get hold of them.
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