Poor sound quality on anything other than "emulation&qu

[epsilon72]

I want to make sure this isn't something that only I'm getting.

When the audio acceleration is set to anything other than "emulation" for me, the sound quality is poor (it sounds like a low bit-rate mp3, or sort of like mid-90's quality game sound).

I have had this problem for as long as I can remember; it was present in Fedora Core before I switched to Gentoo a while ago.

Is this a known issue with wine, or is it something unique to my setup?

[vitamin]

I want to make sure this isn't something that only I'm getting.

When the audio acceleration is set to anything other than "emulation" for me, the sound quality is poor (it sounds like a low bit-rate mp3, or sort of like mid-90's quality game sound).

I have had this problem for as long as I can remember; it was present in Fedora Core before I switched to Gentoo a while ago.

Is this a known issue with wine, or is it something unique to my setup?

Are you using what sound driver? ALSA/OSS?

[epsilon72]

Are you using what sound driver? ALSA/OSS?

I'm using ALSA. I should add though that I've had more than one sound card using ALSA in linux, and the problem is the same.

[vitamin]

Are you using what sound driver? ALSA/OSS?

I'm using ALSA. I should add though that I've had more than one sound card using ALSA in linux, and the problem is the same.

Remove .asoundrc if you have one and try again. If you forcing dmix or some unusual settings that can affect Wine. However in most cases Wine has no problem working with ALSA.

What sound driver and sound hardware do you have?

[dubigrasu]

Hello everyone, my first post here

I know this is an old thread but is similar with my problem.

IMHO the sound card type is not relevant because I'm having the same issue on every PC and card I've tried so far, so I'll skip that.

At the moment I'm playing "Enclave" using wine 1.1.43 compiled from source on PCLinuxOS and Mandriva, and the behavior is the same no matter the OS or PC.

The description epsilon gave:

(it sounds like a low bit-rate mp3, or sort of like mid-90's quality game sound).

is accurate, indeed is a grainy sound not always detectable. For example loud music isn't greatly affected, you can hardly notice the effect.
However, low volume music/sounds such ambient soundtrack (especially mid-frequencies) are badly distorted.

I've tried several sound combinations in winecfg using alsa, oss or jack drivers, with emulation or full hardware acceleration and also different sample rates and bits per sample. In fact, I tried all the possible combinations. The sound is still bad, not skipping, not stuttering, not choppy or whatever...just bad quality.
(BTW, the sound is OK in Windows for the same game)

........................................................
What puzzles me is that this is not always the case with other applications running through wine.
For example the Foobar2000 media player. Using different combinations in winecfg I get:

1 AlSA driver with full hardware acceleration: Low quality/bitrate
2 ALSA driver with emulation: Good quality
3 OSS driver with full hardware acceleration: Good quality
4 OSS driver with emulation: Good quality

So, apparently whatever you use except ALSA with full hardware acceleration is OK.
......................................................

Unfortunately this is not working for games. All the games I played have the same problem, (recently played: Painkiller series, Legacy of Kain and Enclave).
Of course, I can disable the music and solve half of the problem, still sometimes the sound is so low quality that gives me headaches...really.
That's such a pity because the games are otherwise running really great.

Anyway, if anyone knows anything about this or have any ideas please step in
Anything, a hint or some point to start.

Thanks.

[dubigrasu]

I forgot to mention that I searched and I'm still searching at Bugzilla for some ideas, but so far although similar issues are reported I didn't found an answer yet.

[dubigrasu]

I managed to obtain a good quality sound by overriding wine's "dsound" with an original "dsound" from a win install.

The sound is good now with the exception of music, dialogs and menu sounds. Can something be done to resolve this ?

Thanks again.