Ubuntu should ship wine with the wine-pulse patches

[Oli]

Binary package hint: wine1.2

As Ubuntu wants to push Pulseaudio so hard, it makes sense to ship wine with the option to use Pulseaudio directly.

As it stands, there is a collection of patches which adds another audio-driver: http://art.ified.ca/?page_id=40

I'm suggesting that Wine be built with these patches applied so that people can choose the Pulseaudio sink if that suits them best.

This has been brought up multiple times with the Wine project directly and they refuse to ship it (for various reasons, some more valid than others). It's based on an older driver so isn't elegant; it hacks around a few things and a few things don't work... But it currently works (for me and others) a lot better than using its ALSA driver.

It shouldn't be the default driver but it should be there so people with Wine audio issues can try it for sweet relief.

I'm applying the patches to this bug but they can (and probably should) be downloaded directly from the art.ified.ca project site as linked above.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Sep 27 18:50:05 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: wine1.2 1.1.30-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.36-generic
SourcePackage: wine1.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic x86_64

[Ernst (ernst-blaauw)]

I totally agree with this request. In my case, I want to run foobar2000 on Karmic; with the default version of Ubuntu, it is only possible with dirty hacks (start all wine programs with padsp and kill all other music players). This patch (there is actually a new configure patch: version 0.32) supports pulseaudio and makes foobar2000 work correctly out of the box and it plays nicely along other music players.

The patch is supported actively by the developer. Furthermore, wine developers don't want to include the patch because pulse audio is wrong by design: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495. It looks like the developers do not care at all that the audio part of wine is unusable in distributions who ship pulseaudio. However, without this patch, wine is unusable for audio programs.

Thus, I would highly appreciate the inclusion of this patch.

[Oli (oli)]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Ernst <email address hidden> wrote:

> Furthermore, wine
> developers don't want to include the patch because pulse audio is wrong
> by design: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495. It looks like
> the developers do not care at all that the audio part of wine is
> unusable in distributions who ship pulseaudio. However, without this
> patch, wine is unusable for audio programs.
>

Well quite. I had a long discussion with several people on the Wine mailing
list about this patch. There are downsides to it and they basically don't
want to maintain another sound system.

They think ossp and/or gstreamer will fix all the problems in time, allowing
them to drop all-but-one sound system.

It sounds like a perfect scenario but we're an unknown number of months away
from being at that point and people want working audio yesterday, not when
Wine get around to improving their sound framework or we have a usable ossp
framework (and the know-how to use it).

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

The relevant question for Karmic is whether including the patch has any potential of breaking anything. Should it be the default sound driver? Sound driver selection is done by prefix, so upgrading users won't have it anyway.

[Oli (oli)]

*I *don't think it should be the default selection.

I've sung its praises but I'm sure it doesn't work for everybody in all
circumstances. But It does help *some* people *some* times. We should give
them the option without them having to use an outdated PPA or making them
compile it in themselves.

Does it break anything? I don't believe so... I can't really say more than
"works for me".

These (the patches and Wine) are two entities moving in slightly different
directions at different speeds so I guess there's always scope for the patch
to stop working down the line (as there is with almost every Ubuntu patch
applied to upstream projects) but the developer looks like he's trying to
keep things working within Wine's framework.

Hopefully progress in Wine will replace the need for the patch in time but
we'll see.

[Happypony (happypony)]

Wines current management of sound in Karmic is shocking, it stutters and causes frequent 100% CPU utilization when I load and run Furcadia."www.furcadia.com", so as Furcadia emits a sound I can see spikes in CPU usage. Wine so needs to better support Pulse Audio, ok I'll rephrase that, the Ubuntu Distribution of wine needs offer the option of better integration into the pule Audio system.

[Ernst (ernst-blaauw)]

At the moment, I have good results with the wine1.2 package from the PPA for
Ubuntu Wine Team (https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ppa) with the
latest pulseaudio packages from the Ubuntu Audio Dev team PPA (
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ppa). In winecfg, I have
hardware emulation set to 'full'. Using this setup, I have no problems with
foobar. It constantly plays correctly: no stuttering, no hangs op the sound,
no poppups.

Without the above packages (= the inital Karmic configuration), I had
constant stuttering sound with foobar. After I installed wine1.2 with
pulseaudio patches, I have mostly a good experience, but sometimes the audio
stalled.

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 20:20, Happypony <email address hidden> wrote:

> Wines current management of sound in Karmic is shocking, it stutters and
> causes frequent 100% CPU utilization when I load and run
> Furcadia."www.furcadia.com", so as Furcadia emits a sound I can see
> spikes in CPU usage. Wine so needs to better support Pulse Audio, ok
> I'll rephrase that, the Ubuntu Distribution of wine needs offer the
> option of better integration into the pule Audio system.
>
> --
> Ubuntu should ship wine with the wine-pulse patches
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/437749
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Ernst (ernst-blaauw)]

Correct link for the Ubuntu Audio Dev team ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-audio-dev/+archive/ppa

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 14:40, Ernst Blaauw <email address hidden> wrote:

> At the moment, I have good results with the wine1.2 package from the PPA
> for Ubuntu Wine Team (https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ppa)
> with the latest pulseaudio packages from the Ubuntu Audio Dev team PPA (
> https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ppa). In winecfg, I have
> hardware emulation set to 'full'. Using this setup, I have no problems with
> foobar. It constantly plays correctly: no stuttering, no hangs op the sound,
> no poppups.
>
> Without the above packages (= the inital Karmic configuration), I had
> constant stuttering sound with foobar. After I installed wine1.2 with
> pulseaudio patches, I have mostly a good experience, but sometimes the audio
> stalled.
>
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 20:20, Happypony <email address hidden> wrote:
>
>> Wines current management of sound in Karmic is shocking, it stutters and
>> causes frequent 100% CPU utilization when I load and run
>> Furcadia."www.furcadia.com", so as Furcadia emits a sound I can see
>> spikes in CPU usage. Wine so needs to better support Pulse Audio, ok
>> I'll rephrase that, the Ubuntu Distribution of wine needs offer the
>> option of better integration into the pule Audio system.
>>
>> --
>> Ubuntu should ship wine with the wine-pulse patches
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/437749
>> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
>> of the bug.
>>
>
>

[Aigars Mahinovs (aigarius)]

Can anyone update on what is the status of this issue and who is the person to decide on this? Is there a Ubuntu wine maintainer or is it taken straight from Debian?

[Radu Cristescu (radu.c)]

You can always use PulseAudio's ESounD emulation by telling Wine to use the ESounD driver. Works great for me under Karmic.

[jk (johan-illwinter)]

Using winepulse fixes all wine sound problems for me too. Using the ESound driver works somewhat, music is fine that way, but the latency is a way too high to be useable for games.

[João Ricardo Lourenço (jorl17)]

The lack of completeness of this patch is a major blocker for me to agree with its inclusion. Until Ubuntu 9.10, my Wine could use ALSA without any issue, side-by-side with Pulseaudio. Back in that time I managed to follow the "Pulseaudio Configuration Guides" around the Ubuntu Forums.

Now, with everything changed, sound is problematic, but that's another issue.

I think that, if winepulse is to be added, it should be actively maintained and severely tested before being included in Ubuntu's packages.

[Aigars Mahinovs (aigarius)]

What is incomplete in this patch? I have been using it for like a year now with no ill sidefects and with no missing functionality.

[Yözen Hernández (yhernand)]

Fedora includes the winepulse patch by default, that counts for something. (Granted they are lagging behind a few wine releases)

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=155086

[Maia Everett (linneris)]

I'm in favor of adding these patches in Maverick. As it stands, I have long run World of Warcraft using the vivnet PPA build, and experienced no issues in it or other games, whereas the ALSA driver results in crackling sound.