Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

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mikefreeman72
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Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by mikefreeman72 »

In version 1.3.24 and previous versions, sound was hit-and-miss on my system unless I had ESD enabled. Now that ESD has been removed, so has any reliable sound.

When using the ALSA driver, some sounds work for a while, after which all sound completely stops. Enabling ESD and using the PulseAudio eSound plugin made all sounds work perfectly. That is now gone with version 1.3.25, and sound is now trashed again.

I don't want to remove PulseAudio, because that removes some sound features that I enjoy.

How do I contact the WINE developers and request that they either put ESD support back in, or create a PulseAudio driver?

Thanks!
vitamin
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Re: Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by vitamin »

mikefreeman72 wrote:How do I contact the WINE developers and request that they either put ESD support back in, or create a PulseAudio driver?
You can complain all you want but it won't change anyone's mind. If you do not want to remove PA, disable it while using Wine. And make sure ALSA is properly configured as well (with dmix plugin enabled).
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Post by shaneo1 »

I was annoyed as you was but there is a way around it, Pulse is not really needed now the ALSA is working very well.

Here is my post, http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=12915
mikefreeman72
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Post by mikefreeman72 »

It certainly is required if I want to have quick, easy access to my media player controls through Indicator-sound. Removing PulseAudio from Ubuntu/Linux Mint removes that, and it takes some adding of a specialized PPA (the old alsa tools aren't present in Ubuntu anymore) and installing 3rd-party packages in order to get basic controls that don't have the nice easy-access controls for all my media players all in one menu. I don't want to do that just so I can run a couple Windows programs. This "update" just makes thing so much more difficult than they really need to be.
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Post by Erufailon »

I cannot understand why Wine Team did this. At the moment PulseAudio is the default audio driver in Ubuntu which means 95% of users is using it. I don't understand the reason they had to do it. Why not support both ALSA and PulseAudio? Is it compatibility issue? Why do I need to change my system so Wine can work properly? Why do I need to lose the volume control which also controls the multimedia via hardware buttons?
All that are reasonable questions. Any update should make things easier for the majority of the people and not force them to change their system configuration.
At least they could have warned us that anyone who has PulseAudio not to install the update. Now I have to choose between playing the games mute or lose the volume control.
Great Job Wine Team... :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :(
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Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by tparker »

On 07/26/2011 05:54 PM, Erufailon wrote:
I cannot understand why Wine Team did this. At the moment PulseAudio is the default audio driver in Ubuntu which means 95% of users is using it.<snip> Why do I need to lose the volume control which also controls the multimedia via hardware buttons?
There are other volume control programs that will work with your
hardware buttons, my current system has never had any part of PulseAudio
installed and all of my keyboard, speaker remote, etc. buttons for sound
have always worked fine (OpenSuse 11.4) It would take some research and
maybe some digging in the Ubuntu repos, but you should be able to find a
control program that meets your needs.
All that are reasonable questions. Any update should make things easier for the majority of the people and not force them to change their system configuration.
But I don't think Ubuntu users are the majority of Wine users and in
general people have had much more trouble with their sound through Wine
when using Pulse then without it. This has been a long time coming -
people on the list have been answering Pulse related sound issue
questions for ages and it just isn't worth it when the program isn't
necessary.

At least they could have warned us that anyone who has PulseAudio not to install the update.
I agree that it can take some searching to find 'update' or 'patch note'
type information that is understandable to non-devs, but if I remember
correctly there are links on the WineHQ page that will take you to the
changes for each version. There is also a sticky about sound issues at
the top of the forums the specifically addresses PulseAudio as a major
problem.

All of that said - after updating to 1.3.25 the only program of mine
through Wine that now gets any sound at all is LotRO, sound is broken
for everything else (WoW, Teamspeak, anything through Steam, STO,
Champions Online). And that is with the KDE default sound backend and no
PulseAudio anything, time to go digging through settings and such and
seeing what I can find! :)
mikefreeman72
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Re: Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by mikefreeman72 »

tparker wrote:There are other volume control programs that will work with your
hardware buttons, my current system has never had any part of PulseAudio
installed and all of my keyboard, speaker remote, etc. buttons for sound
have always worked fine (OpenSuse 11.4) It would take some research and
maybe some digging in the Ubuntu repos, but you should be able to find a
control program that meets your needs.
I think what he means is that much of alsa has been completely removed from Ubuntu, other than the base required to run PulseAudio. So, there aren't many controls left available. Your distro doesn't rely heavily on PulseAudio, which is why you've never had the problem we do. There isn't even the usual alsa volume control panel applet in Ubuntu/Mint anymore. It's all running through the indicator-sound menu, which is PulseAudio only.
But I don't think Ubuntu users are the majority of Wine users and in
general people have had much more trouble with their sound through Wine
when using Pulse then without it. This has been a long time coming -
people on the list have been answering Pulse related sound issue
questions for ages and it just isn't worth it when the program isn't
necessary.
Why do you think that Ubuntu users are not the majority of Wine users? Ubuntu and Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) are arguably the two biggest distributions out there, making up the vast majority of Linux users. And as they are both geared toward new users (read: ex-Windows users), Wine weighs heavily in that. New users want a way to still use their old software/games. I would think Ubuntu/Mint users would be in the majority on Wine. That said, I don't have the Wine user stats in front of me, so I can't say more than my own gut feeling on that.

To say that the program isn't necessary may *technically* be true, but, for Ubuntu/Mint users, in practice it is completely wrong. Ubuntu has made PulseAudio pretty much mandatory if you want to have any level of control over your sound. So for Wine to drop support for PulseAudio means Wine dropped support for Ubuntu/Mint/Other PulseAudio-focused distros, arguably the largest group of Linux users.
I agree that it can take some searching to find 'update' or 'patch note'
type information that is understandable to non-devs, but if I remember
correctly there are links on the WineHQ page that will take you to the
changes for each version. There is also a sticky about sound issues at
the top of the forums the specifically addresses PulseAudio as a major
problem.
I've been reading the release notes for every Wine release for years, and this still caught me totally by surprise. I generally don't have problems with Wine that I can't figure out, so I'm just about never on the forums. Something coming up that would seriously impact a large swath of users really should be announced front-and-center in big, bold, flashing, full-color print on the WineHQ web site (Ok, I exaggerated there, but still...). Even if I knew they were having problems with PulseAudio, my assumption upon reading that would be to think they were working on a fix for the problem, not dumping support for it altogether. That just makes no sense, especially when many distros (not just Ubuntu/Mint) use PulseAudio as the default, and I wouldn't expect new users (the ones that really benefit the most from Wine) to know how to remedy the problem without large amounts of frustration driving them away from this platform.

So, basically, my point with this thread is that I'm frustrated with the decision to remove the only PulseAudio-friendly work around I've found for Wine (the ESD driver), and want to understand the reasoning behind it. That's all. Just trying to find a reasonable way to deal with the issue.
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Post by Erufailon »

@tparker

I was searching for about 3h to find another volume control applet but I didn't found anything. Even the old Volume Control from 10.04 or 10.10 that was compatible with ALSA is removed from 11.04 and just now I found that even the default "Sound" program is not working.
As said in the previous post by mikefreeman72 the Ubuntu users are the majority user base of Wine as ex-Windows users (me included).
I always check the release not of any update and the only thing mentioned was "Rewrite of the audio support, using the Win7 architecture." Does that mean "Any PulseAudio program will stop having sound"? I think it's a major mistake from Wine Team that caught many people by surprise.
If there is a thread with PulseAudio bugs then that means that are working on that bugs not that they will stop support for Ubuntu users, because lets face it, the everyday user does not want an update to force him change something that is by default in his system. If it is then they must stop supporting Ubuntu because the majority of Ubuntu users is using the default drivers.
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Re: Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by dimesio »

mikefreeman72 wrote: So for Wine to drop support for PulseAudio
Wine has never had support for PulseAudio. The "winepulse" driver some distros ship is unofficial and unsupported.

Wine's sound architecture is being overhauled. Some things will inevitably break along the way; bugs should be filed for real regressions.

A link to http://wiki.winehq.org/Sound was posted in another thread. I suggest all of you having sound problems read it carefully.
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Re: Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by mikefreeman72 »

dimesio wrote:
mikefreeman72 wrote: So for Wine to drop support for PulseAudio
Wine has never had support for PulseAudio. The "winepulse" driver some distros ship is unofficial and unsupported.

Wine's sound architecture is being overhauled. Some things will inevitably break along the way; bugs should be filed for real regressions.

A link to http://wiki.winehq.org/Sound was posted in another thread. I suggest all of you having sound problems read it carefully.
Yes, I know. That's not exactly what I meant. I guess I should have worded that better. I should have said "So for Wine to drop support for the only workaround for PulseAudio that worked..."

Basically, if I can't use the ESD driver, I can't use PulseAudio with Wine. If I can't use PulseAudio, my user experience with Wine on Ubuntu/Mint is worsened because I can't nicely fall back to alsa. That's what I meant.

Now, if they are reworking the audio code, maybe things will eventually improve. I can be patient. It was just abrupt and frustrating to not know what was going on and why.
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Re: Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by jorl17 »

mikefreeman72 wrote:
dimesio wrote:
mikefreeman72 wrote: So for Wine to drop support for PulseAudio
Wine has never had support for PulseAudio. The "winepulse" driver some distros ship is unofficial and unsupported.

Wine's sound architecture is being overhauled. Some things will inevitably break along the way; bugs should be filed for real regressions.

A link to http://wiki.winehq.org/Sound was posted in another thread. I suggest all of you having sound problems read it carefully.
Yes, I know. That's not exactly what I meant. I guess I should have worded that better. I should have said "So for Wine to drop support for the only workaround for PulseAudio that worked..."

Basically, if I can't use the ESD driver, I can't use PulseAudio with Wine. If I can't use PulseAudio, my user experience with Wine on Ubuntu/Mint is worsened because I can't nicely fall back to alsa. That's what I meant.

Now, if they are reworking the audio code, maybe things will eventually improve. I can be patient. It was just abrupt and frustrating to not know what was going on and why.
For the record, back when PA and Wine had an incompatibility in Ubuntu (and when I used Ubuntu), I hacked away a very bad thing that allowed me to have sound. What I did was force Pulseaudio to go through DMIX instead of taking control over hw:0. This was great because I could have apps use Pulse and apps use ALSA directly. So I had Wine use ALSA and everything else use Pulse. It worked great for my needs, maybe you can temporarily do that?

I don't know how you felt that ESD worked, but back in the days I used it, it was terrible -- in the sense that it lagged 1-2 s. So, in CS, I'd shoot and hear the shot 2 seconds later.

Still, I don't get why Wine+PA doesn't work on these many machines. I've never had issues except for the one that forced me to hack away, and that was a one-time bug!

As for the new overhaul, I'm not upgrading Wine until I see that everyone has relaxed with all these sound issues.
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Re: Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by mikefreeman72 »

jorl17 wrote: For the record, back when PA and Wine had an incompatibility in Ubuntu (and when I used Ubuntu), I hacked away a very bad thing that allowed me to have sound. What I did was force Pulseaudio to go through DMIX instead of taking control over hw:0. This was great because I could have apps use Pulse and apps use ALSA directly. So I had Wine use ALSA and everything else use Pulse. It worked great for my needs, maybe you can temporarily do that?
This sounds like a good temp solution. How exactly did you do that?
I don't know how you felt that ESD worked, but back in the days I used it, it was terrible -- in the sense that it lagged 1-2 s. So, in CS, I'd shoot and hear the shot 2 seconds later.
To be honest, we're not hard-core gamers. We don't play games that are all that timing-critical. Most of what I'm trying to get to work is games for my kids that people have given us as gifts (which of course are Windows-only). Some of the games give instructions audibly instead of written on screen, so the kids HAVE to be able to hear the audio.

In addition to those, Plants vs. Zombies is a family favorite. We don't HAVE to hear the sound on that, but it's nice to hear the music, and some of the Zombies have an audible cue as they come on screen, which is important in the fog levels (if you've ever played it that far, you'll understand). But nothing in that game is really affected if the sound is slightly behind.

So, I've never really noticed a delay.
As for the new overhaul, I'm not upgrading Wine until I see that everyone has relaxed with all these sound issues.
I'm probably going to track down the previous version and reinstall it, if I can't figure out a better solution. Again, I'd really like to hear the details on your PulseAudio to dmix fix. Thanks!
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Post by Cloudef »

Wine does not break pulseaudio, it was never supported.. And it's good that Wine is overhauling it's sound system as some applications had problems with it. This happens in dev all the time (well, expect for windows where they leave 'undocumented features', so that backwards compatibility says and users wont whine)

If you are not happy, create patches or use the older version.
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Post by mikefreeman72 »

Please read the entire thread before posting, because this has been discussed already. I never said it breaks PulseAudio. I said the most recent version removed the only workaround for that I knew of by removing the ESD driver. I understand what they are doing. Doesn't mean I'm happy with how it has affected my use of it, though.
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Post by hibba »

On a side note, wasn't there a way to run ALSA through PulseAudio? If I remember correctly, it was done somehow with the padsp command. Does anyone know if this would allow WINE to think it's using ALSA while still letting PA run?

Hibba.
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Post by DaVince »

Erufailon wrote:I cannot understand why Wine Team did this. At the moment PulseAudio is the default audio driver in Ubuntu which means 95% of users is using it. I don't understand the reason they had to do it. Why not support both ALSA and PulseAudio?
Because PA has an ALSA compatibility layer anyway, so if the Wine ALSA driver doesn't work, it's more likely this compatibility layer's fault than Wine's.

Considering the audio system in Wine is being reimplemented, I think there will be less issues concerning both ALSA and PA audio, anyway.
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Post by DaVince »

DaVince wrote:
Erufailon wrote:I cannot understand why Wine Team did this. At the moment PulseAudio is the default audio driver in Ubuntu which means 95% of users is using it. I don't understand the reason they had to do it. Why not support both ALSA and PulseAudio?
Because PA has an ALSA compatibility layer anyway, so if the Wine ALSA driver doesn't work, it's more likely this compatibility layer's fault than Wine's.

Considering the audio system in Wine is being reimplemented, I think there will be less issues concerning both ALSA and PA audio, anyway.
Sorry, I'm just duplicating what's been said already.
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Re: Wine 1.3.25 kills sound with PulseAudio

Post by jorl17 »

mikefreeman72 wrote:
jorl17 wrote: For the record, back when PA and Wine had an incompatibility in Ubuntu (and when I used Ubuntu), I hacked away a very bad thing that allowed me to have sound. What I did was force Pulseaudio to go through DMIX instead of taking control over hw:0. This was great because I could have apps use Pulse and apps use ALSA directly. So I had Wine use ALSA and everything else use Pulse. It worked great for my needs, maybe you can temporarily do that?
This sounds like a good temp solution. How exactly did you do that?
IIRC it was in my last days of Ubuntu, so I was pretty much fed up with all that and mad. It was indeed extremely hacky, since I even grabbed the sources of libasound and changed them.

I have a link for what I did here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... omments/10 .

As you see (I'm remembering now), it's basically what I described. After rerouting Pulse through ALSA, I hardcoded a wine-default device to Wine (via registry) and to ALSA (by modifying the ALSA code). The last step (modifying ALSA code) would probably not have been needed , but my ALSA skills were (and are) very low. I suggest that a better solution might be to just create the pcm.!default entry to be of type "pulse" and to create a wine-default entry to point to dmix for playback and pulse (or dsnoop, you chose) for recording. As I look at it, it was indeed a terrible terrible terrible hack, but it did the work. feel free to PM me or email me at jorl17.8 at-symbol gmail dot-symbol com and I will try to help you out.

Cheers,

Jorl17
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Post by farika »

Hi. I have the same issue. With wine 1.3.25 and 1.3.26 i only have Alsa , no oss or other... And the sound test fail...
I need wine 1.3.25 or 26 because with , i don't have the pointer issue with steam games , but i don't have sound... It is with kubuntu natty.
I've remove pulse audio and i have only alsa now... Pulse was remove by aptitude...
But same : No sound and test fail.

Help please (sorry for my english ;))
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Post by oiaohm »

Number 1 ESD is basically not required. Really most of the time it was working worse than the Alsa driver set right with pulseaudio.

There is an option people miss. winecfg->audio Then switch hardware acceleration from full to emulation.

Full is for if you have a real sound with real on board hardware doing the mixing. Emulation is for some cards with dmix, pulseaudio and other sound servers.

Failure to set to emulation wine will kill Pulseaudio. Because it will ask too much of it like real-time buffers. Yes its a major defect in Pulseaudio that wine can kill it out right. Ok wine losing sound fine but an application should not be able to kill it out right even if set wrong. One of the big problems with ALSA design is that it was designed with the world of dmix in mind. So you cannot probe for a stack of features. Instead you were indented to be able to presume they are in existence. Emulation is designed to work around buggy dmix alsa card combination.

Also Pulseaudio will break some programs running in wine. Would not make any difference if wine created a driver for pulseaudio. The issue is that Pulseaudio is sluggish compared to the Windows sound system.

hibba padsp wraps the wine oss driver. But not all builds contain the oss driver any more because particular Linux Distributions decided to drop the oss libraries.

jorl17 2 second lag is infact a pulseaudio issue at times. So even go alsa to pulse people can suffering from that.

By the way jorl17 all that hack you have does is restore ALSA to it default operation before Pulseaudio authors messed with it.

Totally not required if Pulseaudio would proper work as a dmix replacement.

Really I am not looking forward to the new sound system in wine. I just fear if it done to suit pulseaudio the numbers of applications that will not be workable will be a lot.

jorl17 that hack you have seams like the best solution in my point of view until pulseaudio is good enough or replaced because people are sick of it issues.
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Post by Hack-a-Matic »

I have exactly same issues. I was able to ressolve the issue however in a simple way - increase pulseaudio buffers.

edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

find and set these two from
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 10

to
default-fragments = 24
default-fragment-size-msec = 100

This increases pa buffer size from 80msec to 2,4 sec. Now restart pulse local server by kill -9 it and sound issue was gone for me.
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