Scratchy sound in Wine

[sabian2008]

Hey everyone, I'm running Wine 1.6.2 in Debian Jessie amd64 and i'm experimenting issues with the sound. I've spent several hours googling but couldn't find a solution.

At first, I usually didn't have sound at all, but when it did, it was fine. Later, I installed libasound2-plugins:i386 and the randomness in accessing the audio hardware seems to have been solved, but, on the other hand, the audio got corrupted. Every sound signal started by wine (from winecfg or a game in Steam) is scratchy and impossible to recognize. I'm using the ALSA driver and using Gnome, which equals to PulseAudio being my default sound frontend.

The output in the terminal while running winecfg is:
"err:ole:CoInitializeEx Attempt to change threading model of this apartment from multi-threaded to apartment threaded"

At times, a conflict with p11-kit appears too I think, because this one ain't multiarch.

If you want the log from some of the sound modules or whatever, tell me which one.

I already tried changing default-fragment-size-msec to 5msec, with no luck.

Regards

[sabian2008]

I'll add some info. After a reboot, it seems that now, sometimes the sound gets scratchy, some other work just fine. So, basically, I have upgraded from "sometimes working, sometimes not" to "sometimes horrible sound, sometimes just fine"... one step at a time. Anyway, if you would like me to append some log when it happens again, just tell me.

[dimesio]

The ole error is normal output for the sound test in winecfg. The p11-kit error is unrelated to sound.

What versions of PulseAudio and alsa-plugins do you have? Pulseaudio should be 3.0 or later, alsa-plugins should be 1.0.26 or later; older versions had bugs affecting Wine that have been fixed.

Does sound work in Wine if you disable Pulseaudio?

You should also upgrade Wine. If the problem persists in current Wine, with up-to-date PulseAudio and alsa-plugins, try the troubleshooting steps in http://wiki.winehq.org/Sound.

There is an existing bug for sound crackling in many games, http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28282. If none of the above suggestions help, you should leave a comment in that bug with the information requested on the wiki Sound page.

[dimesio]

I'll add some info. After a reboot, it seems that now, sometimes the sound gets scratchy, some other work just fine. So, basically, I have upgraded from "sometimes working, sometimes not" to "sometimes horrible sound, sometimes just fine"... one step at a time. Anyway, if you would like me to append some log when it happens again, just tell me.

"Sometimes" is vague; is there any pattern to when it happens?

[sabian2008]

pulseaudio is 4.0
libasound-plugins is 1.0.27-2+b1

Tomorrow I'll try to stop pulseaudio and see what happens with plain ALSA.

The "sometimes" is because I haven't figured out a pattern, at times with the same apps running and using pulseaudio, I can see different behaviours. However, it seems that chances of working bad are greater if I have other applications using PulseAudio. With a fine tuning, I've realized that, even when it's working, the sound isn't 100% okey, but that might be related to the game "emulation" itself and not a wine sound problem itself. I've read several times the Sound wiki, but hasn't been helpful for this. I'll look into that bug.

Thanks,
Mauro

[dimesio]

However, it seems that chances of working bad are greater if I have other applications using PulseAudio.

Check your CPU usage when it's happening.