SoC idea: improve dsound/winmm
Hi, One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer underruns and high latencies in games. For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards. None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too. In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts. Regards, Roderick Colenbrander -- Echte DSL-Flatrate dauerhaft f�r 0,- Euro*! "Feel free" mit GMX DSL! http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl
On Friday 21 April 2006 20:52, Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
Hi,
One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer underruns and high latencies in games.
For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards. None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too.
In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts.
I approve this proposal. DSound/WinMM is the main cause of games problems (after copy protections) : performances hole, deadlocks ...
Regards, Roderick Colenbrander
Regards, Raphael
On 4/21/06, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Hi,
One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer underruns and high latencies in games.
For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards. None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too.
In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts.
The only problem I have with this project idea is the ambiguity of 'improve dsound/winmm'. At what point is dsound and winmm considered to be improved? It would be nice to see a list of specific items that need to be fixed, and I mean more specific than crackling playback and high latencies. A specific project that would probably help with this situation is to combine all wine audio drivers into one driver, wineaudio. The common functionality of the drivers can be factored out, reducing code size while at the same time minimizing the chance for more bugs. -- James Hawkins
James Hawkins wrote:
On 4/21/06, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Hi,
One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer underruns and high latencies in games.
For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards. None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too.
In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts.
The only problem I have with this project idea is the ambiguity of 'improve dsound/winmm'. At what point is dsound and winmm considered to be improved? It would be nice to see a list of specific items that need to be fixed, and I mean more specific than crackling playback and high latencies. A specific project that would probably help with this situation is to combine all wine audio drivers into one driver, wineaudio. The common functionality of the drivers can be factored out, reducing code size while at the same time minimizing the chance for more bugs.
-- James Hawkins
I have a suggestion for a clearer definition: Get Super Collapse 2 to work in Wine without audio artifacts or a mile of dsound err code dumped to the console. Console output: segin(a)segin ~/.wine/c/Program Files/GameHouse/Collapse II $ wine relapse This sound card's driver does not support direct access The (slower) DirectSound HEL mode will be used instead. err:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne underrun on sound buffer 0x7fd8f6e8 [*cut for breverity, it's all repetitive*] segin(a)segin ~/.wine/c/Program Files/GameHouse/Collapse II $
On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 18:17:45 -0400, Segin wrote:
I have a suggestion for a clearer definition: Get Super Collapse 2 to work in Wine without audio artifacts or a mile of dsound err code dumped to the console.
Do the artifacts change or disappear if you use my thread priority patch?
James Hawkins wrote:
On 4/21/06, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Hi,
One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer underruns and high latencies in games.
For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards. None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too.
In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts.
The only problem I have with this project idea is the ambiguity of 'improve dsound/winmm'. At what point is dsound and winmm considered to be improved? It would be nice to see a list of specific items that need to be fixed, and I mean more specific than crackling playback and high latencies. A specific project that would probably help with this situation is to combine all wine audio drivers into one driver, wineaudio. The common functionality of the drivers can be factored out, reducing code size while at the same time minimizing the chance for more bugs.
actually there are different issues (and potential projects): - factorize all mm drivers into a single one o to be done for wave, midi, mixer winmm interfaces o potentially, make use of a portability audio library (beware of latency issues, even for winmm here) o fix the way mm winmm interfaces are chosen from the available ones (tricky when several cards are present on the same machine) o to be done for dsound wave interfaces - make dsound work in all cases. this covers o rework no dsound interfaces in audio drivers o fix the latency of dsound (may tackle thread priority at some point) o work on the audio stream mixing in dsound - the crossing of the two previous items o fix the way dsound interfaces are gotten from mm drivers (still a dirty hack today) A+ -- Eric Pouech
Don't know if this really helps in any way, but I think it should be noted: For a few games (eg, Freelancer), I noticed that the background music stutters. This is often _not_ DSound or WinMM related, but a bug in Wine's MP3 codec. Using a native codec (eg, Fraunhofer Radium codec) fixes the stutter. Am Samstag, 22. April 2006 10:26 schrieb Eric Pouech:
James Hawkins wrote:
On 4/21/06, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Hi,
One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer underruns and high latencies in games.
For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards. None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too.
In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts.
The only problem I have with this project idea is the ambiguity of 'improve dsound/winmm'. At what point is dsound and winmm considered to be improved? It would be nice to see a list of specific items that need to be fixed, and I mean more specific than crackling playback and high latencies. A specific project that would probably help with this situation is to combine all wine audio drivers into one driver, wineaudio. The common functionality of the drivers can be factored out, reducing code size while at the same time minimizing the chance for more bugs.
actually there are different issues (and potential projects): - factorize all mm drivers into a single one o to be done for wave, midi, mixer winmm interfaces o potentially, make use of a portability audio library (beware of latency issues, even for winmm here) o fix the way mm winmm interfaces are chosen from the available ones (tricky when several cards are present on the same machine) o to be done for dsound wave interfaces - make dsound work in all cases. this covers o rework no dsound interfaces in audio drivers o fix the latency of dsound (may tackle thread priority at some point) o work on the audio stream mixing in dsound - the crossing of the two previous items o fix the way dsound interfaces are gotten from mm drivers (still a dirty hack today)
A+
-- Willie Sippel //////// | Tritium Studios // | ______________________________ //// /// | http://www.tritium-studios.com <willie(a)froq.net>
Willie Sippel wrote:
Don't know if this really helps in any way, but I think it should be noted: For a few games (eg, Freelancer), I noticed that the background music stutters. This is often _not_ DSound or WinMM related, but a bug in Wine's MP3 codec. Using a native codec (eg, Fraunhofer Radium codec) fixes the stutter. is this still the case ? we should have fixed our MP3 decoder two months ago for issues like this one.
A+ -- Eric Pouech
participants (7)
-
Eric Pouech -
James Hawkins -
Mike Hearn -
Raphael -
Roderick Colenbrander -
Segin -
Willie Sippel