Comment 273 for bug 371897

(In reply to comment #167)
> How hard can it be?

Pretty hard, obviously. ;)

The thing is, while ALSA alone may catch a) and c), b) and d) always were an issue for a normal user.

PulseAudio, on the other hand, certainly excels in b) (just look at the new gnome-volume-control) and obviously d). While it's not yet as optimized for c) - the latency of winepulse.drv is way better than the up-to-1s latency of wineesd.drv when connected to PulseAudio.

As for a), PulseAudio is the choice for the desktop distributions - and, while technically irrelevant to Wine because of ARM chipsets, even Nokia's Maemo and Palm's WebOS use PulseAudio on mobiles.