Comment 355 for bug 371897

My point of view is quite simple: I want wine to work with audio without resorting to uninstalling (or even suspending) PulseAudio. I don't care how it's done, if it's by integrating the Pulse driver, by improving either the Alsa or OSS driver so using them in a Pulse-enabled system is as good as using Art Taylor's patch, or by doing an OpenAL driver; I just care that an answer is found, it's done sooner rather than later, and the user experience is at least as good as using Art Taylor's patch.

Last time I tested, the application I use (World of Warcraft) had non-usable audio with both Alsa and OSS drivers. The only way I could get it to work correctly without Art Taylor's patch was by killing Pulse, which I don't think it's an acceptable solution, as I then lose all audio from the rest of my system.
(I can't test it right now as I'm still recovering from a HD crash, but my last test was 1 or 2 months ago, I don't believe much changed since then).

As an user I would be willing to do small system-wide tweaks (as long as they don't break anything else), or large wine-specific tweaks (which is similar to what I'm doing, by currently maintaining my own tree with patches to three different bugs the developers seem not willing to either acknowledge or fix), but large system-wide changes (like changing the whole sound sub-system and dealing with all configuration changes needed) are well beyond what should be expected of a user. Besides, I do like the extra features Pulse brings, such as per application volume control.

Every other non-abandoned, sound-using application I've ever used works either out of the box or with the padsp utility; wine is the only application I currently can't get to play well with Pulse without resorting to a patch.