Foobar 2000 and Wine: terrible sound problem.

hizKYPVooz · Post by **hizKYPVooz** » Thu Apr 26, 2012 12:36 pm

Hi, I am new here.

Ever since I use Ubuntu Linux I've used Wine. This worked nice until version 1.3.x; 1.3.7, I believe.
Now I cannot play music anymore with Foobar2000 and the new version of Wine. The problem is that the sound is very distorted every now and then and it even stops sometimes.

Initially I've done some tests with Pulse Audio disabled because according to some users that should help. Well: it did not.
So I enabled Pulse Audio again and subsequently tried every viable option proposed here: http://wiki.winehq.org/Sound

Now it is even worse. After installing that directmusic and dsound stuff sound playback is now really, well..., crap. Before I could sort of play music at 32 bit, now it is only 16 bit and the sound quality is terrible any way.

Since there are no that many bugreports on sound lately I guess I've found a new problem.

I've send bug reports to the author of foobar2000 because I thought it was a specific foobar2000 problem, but he doesn't accept bugreports for problems detected if the program is run on Wine.

So please can you help me?

hizKYPVooz · Post by **hizKYPVooz** » Thu Apr 26, 2012 12:40 pm

I forgot to tell that with Pulse Audio disabled I had a lot of output options both in Foobar 2000 and in Wine. I could even select the different audio devices separately. Now with Pulse Audio enabled I've only a few Pulse Audio related option left.

Even more interestingly: I now notice that before in Wine the selected driver was winealsa.drv but now it is winepulse.drv.
I guess that's not good...

Ma Xiaojun · Post by **Ma Xiaojun** » Thu Apr 26, 2012 12:44 pm

I just wonder by saying 1.3.x works, are you using the same kernel you use now?

Post by **dimesio** » Thu Apr 26, 2012 4:07 pm

hizKYPVooz wrote: Even more interestingly: I now notice that before in Wine the selected driver was winealsa.drv but now it is winepulse.drv.
I guess that's not good...

The winepulse driver is not part of Wine, and not supported here.

Make sure you are using PulseAudio 1.1 or newer and alsa-plugins 1.0.25 or newer. If you can reproduce the problem in plain Wine using the winealsa driver and the latest versions of PulseAudio and alsa-plugins, file a bug.

hizKYPVooz · Post by **hizKYPVooz** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 11:50 am

Thanks for your responses.

@Ma Xiaojun: No, I update the kernel whenever possible or necessary so it was a different kernel. The Wine version that did work back then was 1.3.29 (I've looked it up...).

@dimesio: I'm happy to get rid of that Winepulse.drv driver but I don't even know where it comes from. I guess installing directmusic or dsound did it. Because it appeared after installing those files.

Anyway, the modern Wine versions choose automatically the sound driver so apparently Wine *thinks* Winepulse.drv is appropriate whether or not it is supported.

So I guess the only way of getting rid of winepulse is removing it.
How can I do this in a safe manner?

hizKYPVooz · Post by **hizKYPVooz** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 12:00 pm

@dimesio: All right, by accident I found out it is possible to disable winepulse.drv by entering it in the library tab of winecfg and setting it to disabled. So once again Wine states that the sound driver is now winealsa.drv.
But sound is still terrible.

What next?

Post by **dimesio** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 5:05 pm

hizKYPVooz wrote:@dimesio: All right, by accident I found out it is possible to disable winepulse.drv by entering it in the library tab of winecfg and setting it to disabled. So once again Wine states that the sound driver is now winealsa.drv.
But sound is still terrible.

What next?

Are you using PulseAudio 1.1 or newer and alsa-plugins 1.0.25 or newer? If not, you need to upgrade them. Beyond that, to file a bug or get further help here, you need to reproduce the problem in plain Wine, since it seems your distro has modified Wine for its packages.