Playing Games with Wine while listening to music

Dark Mayu · Post by **Dark Mayu** » Mon Jun 15, 2009 8:34 am

I have this problem: When playing a PC game via wine while listening to music with let's say Amarok, there's no sound in the PC game anymore. It's like the sound channel is occupied by the music player so wine cannot playback any soundfiles.
Sounds are working if I play a Linux game like Nexuiz while running some music via a music player (ok, completely different, I know, but still...), so I suppose that there's a way to get this too work, but I cannot guess how. Does somebody have any idea? Or is this a current issue which needs some sort of fix?

jorl17 · Post by **jorl17** » Mon Jun 15, 2009 4:28 pm

Dark Mayu wrote:I have this problem: When playing a PC game via wine while listening to music with let's say Amarok, there's no sound in the PC game anymore. It's like the sound channel is occupied by the music player so wine cannot playback any soundfiles.
Sounds are working if I play a Linux game like Nexuiz while running some music via a music player (ok, completely different, I know, but still...), so I suppose that there's a way to get this too work, but I cannot guess how. Does somebody have any idea? Or is this a current issue which needs some sort of fix?

Hi, what's your distro?

More importantly, do you use a mixer? Do you use OSS or ALSA? (check winecfg).

That's probably due to the fact that Wine gets direct access to the hw (or semidirect, through, say, OSS).

I, myself, use Alsa with Pulseaudio enabled.

Dark Mayu · Post by **Dark Mayu** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 6:24 am

jorl17 wrote:Hi, what's your distro?

More importantly, do you use a mixer? Do you use OSS or ALSA? (check winecfg).

That's probably due to the fact that Wine gets direct access to the hw (or semidirect, through, say, OSS).

I, myself, use Alsa with Pulseaudio enabled.

Thanks for your reply, Distro's Kubuntu 8.10 64bit(sorry, forgot to mention that before). I'm using the Alsamixer since it's the only one which works properly. Wine is configured to use OSS, otherwise, sound doesn't want to work properly(giving an error if you run an win app via terminal, something like "couldn't find audio"). Kubuntu's default audio player is Amarok. It can be configured to use OSS or Alsa, but every setting has the same effect: as soon as I run Amarok with music, any win app won't have any sound.
Pulseaudio however gave me an idea, I'll try some settings within winecfg and post the results later.

jorl17 · Post by **jorl17** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 8:27 am

Dark Mayu wrote:
jorl17 wrote:Hi, what's your distro?

More importantly, do you use a mixer? Do you use OSS or ALSA? (check winecfg).

That's probably due to the fact that Wine gets direct access to the hw (or semidirect, through, say, OSS).

I, myself, use Alsa with Pulseaudio enabled.
Thanks for your reply, Distro's Kubuntu 8.10 64bit(sorry, forgot to mention that before). I'm using the Alsamixer since it's the only one which works properly. Wine is configured to use OSS, otherwise, sound doesn't want to work properly(giving an error if you run an win app via terminal, something like "couldn't find audio"). Kubuntu's default audio player is Amarok. It can be configured to use OSS or Alsa, but every setting has the same effect: as soon as I run Amarok with music, any win app won't have any sound.
Pulseaudio however gave me an idea, I'll try some settings within winecfg and post the results later.

Well, someone correct me if wrong (really, do it

), but I think that's the problem!
You see, if you don't have a mixer for OSS, as soon as it 'catches' the hardware, it doesn't let it go, that's why I talked about pulseaudio.

However, if you don't want it, or if you want to keep alsamixer (pardon me for my ignorance, is that a mixer?) I can advise you to use the alsa-oss wrapper.

This wrapper works in such a way that an OSS app sends its audio into ALSA. When a mixer for ALSA is there, the OSS sound gets mixed too, allowing for multiple sounds!

So, since you're in (k)ubuntu (same thing over here):

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

next thing is to run EVERY wine/OSS app like the following:

aoss <app here>

so, for wine:

aoss wine <yourapp.exe/.com/.somePECrap>

That _should_ do it, I think

Back when Wine had serious problems with Pulseaudio, I used to set it to OSS and do that, but now it seems to work flawlessly in all my installs.

Cheers,

Jorl17

Capoeira · Post by **Capoeira** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 9:51 am

i don't know if this is practical, i don't game. But as i do audio-production i know perhaps another way:
u can use jack-soundserver (jackd), then tell amarok to output to jack and use jack as output for wine with wineasio. don't know if wineasio is in ure repos though.
perhaps alsa-oss is better solution

jorl17 · Post by **jorl17** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 10:53 am

Capoeira wrote:i don't know if this is practical, i don't game. But as i do audio-production i know perhaps another way:
u can use jack-soundserver (jackd), then tell amarok to output to jack and use jack as output for wine with wineasio. don't know if wineasio is in ure repos though.
perhaps alsa-oss is better solution

It's basically the same thing, while being different

In both cases sound is being redirected to something that helps mix. With the pulseaudio approach it _would_ be the same idea, I think.

For him, probably the best thing is what bothers him least. And if wineasio and jack only force him to change a couple of options first, and, then, nothing more, then the Jack approach should be better in terms of usability

James Huk · Post by **James Huk** » Wed Jun 17, 2009 9:14 am

2009/6/16 Dark Mayu <[email protected]>

jorl17 wrote:
Hi, what's your distro?

More importantly, do you use a mixer? Do you use OSS or ALSA? (check
winecfg).
That's probably due to the fact that Wine gets direct access to the hw
(or semidirect, through, say, OSS).
I, myself, use Alsa with Pulseaudio enabled.
Thanks for your reply, Distro's Kubuntu 8.10 64bit(sorry, forgot to mention
that before). I'm using the Alsamixer since it's the only one which works
properly. Wine is configured to use OSS, otherwise, sound doesn't want to
work properly(giving an error if you run an win app via terminal, something
like "couldn't find audio"). Kubuntu's default audio player is Amarok. It
can be configured to use OSS or Alsa, but every setting has the same effect:
as soon as I run Amarok with music, any win app won't have any sound.
Pulseaudio however gave me an idea, I'll try some settings within winecfg
and post the results later.

The problem is that OSS doesn't have software mixer – at least not the old

OSS (there is OSS v4 – but Linux use ALSA instead). This was a major problem
in the past, because on Windows you could run as many apps as you wanted and
sound played perfectly with every of them (even on cheap or integrated
cards), while on OS-es that used OSS... you could run only one app at the
time.

There are some card that support “Hardware mixing” - this feature means that
we are able to send multiple streams directly to the card and its hardware
will mix it for as (examples of such cards are: all cards using EMU10k1/10k2
chipset (SB Live! (NOT Live! 7.1),SB Audigy (NOT Audigy SE) or Aureal
Vortex), however with newer cards this usually isn't the case – even
equipment like Asus Xonar doesn't support hardware mixing and this is rather
expensive card (don't know about Creative X-fi though...).

That's why software sound daemons and mixers were created (ESD, ARTS and now
Pulse Audio), however most of this “mixers” were either abandoned quickly
(ESD) or were depended on other things (ARTS depend on KDE) hence they were
not usable outside their designed environment, and of course application
developers needed to write multiple code implementations for every one of
them... that was (and still is in some cases) pain in the butt. That's why
ALSA developers created dmix – software mixer, first versions were rather
buggy, and required manual edition of some files – but right now dmix is
pretty good and for most cards it works “out of the box”. Unfortunately...
dmix cannot handle OSS directly (even thou OSS is really “emulated” thought
ALSA) so if some app try to use OSS, no other apps will be able to get
access to sound device (unless you have card with hardware mixer). In other
words – all apps you use should be set to use ALSA and all mixers like Pulse
Audio or ARTS should be disabled. Then it should work.

Using aoss isn't really a good idea – this wrapper usually doesn't work good
with wine and this is yet another abstraction layer (another layer=another
problems). I recommend you try fixing ALSA problems (probably something is
using your card, and that's why “No sound card found” or similar errors are
being shown).
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Dark Mayu · Post by **Dark Mayu** » Wed Jun 17, 2009 11:10 am

wow, now I learned something new again, thanks James Huk^^.

Well, 1st back to aoss:

Code: Select all

aoss wine quake2.exe
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

This is the error I get so I suppose that I'm missing dependencies or something else. The app (in this case quake2) works, but won't mix with another soundsoucre. Since there're not many win-games I'm playing on linux (actually only quake 2 and homeworld 2, others have to be played on my winxp partition), I do not bother using another application layer.

When changing winecfg to use alsa, I get sounds while running amarok, but those sounds sound like garbage.
My soundcard (which is an onboard chip, SoundMax I think, the 2nd one ATI HDMI but attached to the speakers) is able to mix. I mentioned that any game compiled on linux like Doom 3 or warzone works normally even when running amarok. Also, when I used windows, it worked, too, so I think it should also be possible on Linux. But from my investigations, I learned that this issue was a long-time-bug... I wonder if there's a solution for it? As James Huk mentioned above, it would work if I could fix Alsa, after all, I get sound with it, too, it's just garbage (while amarok when set to use alsa works normally).

jorl17 · Post by **jorl17** » Wed Jun 17, 2009 2:53 pm

What is your wine version? That 'garbage' sound problem used to exist in older less-pulse-alsa-friendly wine versions. AFAIK since 1.0.15 (or around that) it works perfectly.

So, maybe you should try to upgrade if you haven't already. OTOH it might not be related to it.

But wait, didn't you say before that you had tryed every setting in winecfg? That's why I suggested aoss, otherwise I'd have gone with the simpler ALSA way.

Dark Mayu · Post by **Dark Mayu** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 5:25 am

I'm using the current wine version, 1.1.23, but there're some bugs I seem to have with it. I might install 1.1.22 again which worked abit better(not sure if those bugs are really wine related, didn't have the time to troubleshoot all of them yet).
About the settings, yes, I tested them before, but for some strange reason, I didn't get any sound when using Also in winecfg. But the reason for this could be the Alsamixer, some line-outs where set to 0 volume....

So is there a way to fix the alsa sound in wine? Maybe some dependencies? Is also sound working perfectly for others?