A great way for non programmers to help with Wine - Audio

[Jeremy White]

I've taken the liberty of changing the subject of Robert Reif's
recent email and am expanding it a bit, because I don't want it
to be ignored.

The task is to perform a basic test of Wine's audio
support to make sure it's a stable platform for us to build upon;
what a great way for all you lurkers to help us out <wicked grin>.

The basic procedure is - get a current version of Wine,
test the sound, and send the results in.  It won't take long
(took me ~30 minutes), and it'll be very helpful.

More details:
  Checkout Wine from CVS or git
  Figure out if you're using OSS, Alsa, or Alsa
    in OSS emulation mode (lsmod is your friend,
    and winecfg is quite nice as well)
  Run the test:
    cd dlls/winmm/tests
    WINETEST_INTERACTIVE=1 wine winmm_test.exe.so wave 2>&1 | tee /tmp/wave.out
    *important*
      As it runs, you should hear a nice steady set of soothing beeps,
      all at the same pitch and duration.  If you hear any variation
      from that, make a note of it, so you can report it.
      It's important to listen the whole way through; a tad boring,
      I know, but important; it'll shift to a virtual device half way
      through and it's important to hear if it keeps on working or not.
  Report your results:
    Pack up your output files, and report your results along
    with your sound driver info.  Failures are obviously the most
    interesting, but success on not previously validated hardware/driver
    combos are likely to be useful too.

Sound report:
  Kernel 2.6.13
  Sound driver:  snd_intel8x0
  Sound driver description from lspci:
    Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
  32 bit Debian system
  Alsa version 1.0.10-2
  Tested against Wine CVS up to date as of 5/7/06, 10:27
    (without Robert's last two patches :-/; folks might want to wait
    a hair until those are applied)

Results:
  Tested under winealsa, as well as wineoss with OSS emulation
  All sounds played flawlessly.  Alsa runs reported 0 failures.
  OSS runs reported 48 failures; not clear if that was relevant
  Only anomaly is that the modem driver is treated as an OSS
    sound card, and so has a number of flawed attempts to play
    against it
  Full log files of the runs attached.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Tom Spear]

On 5/7/06, Jeremy White <jwhite(a)codeweavers.com> wrote:
> Only anomaly is that the modem driver is treated as an OSS
>     sound card, and so has a number of flawed attempts to play
>     against it

I believe that this is due to the fact that modems ever since the mid 90's
have the ability to output the sound of the modem's onboard speaker to your
surround system, via the lineout jack on the card itself..  You should
probably just tell OSS to disable the modem as a sound card (not quite sure
how, as I don't even have a modem anymore).

[Robert Reif]

Jeremy White wrote:
> Results:
>  OSS runs reported 48 failures; not clear if that was relevant
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Could you rerun the oss tests with this patch?  
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2006-May/026374.html

[Jeremy White]

Updated this morning, with that patch applied.

Behavior was fairly badly broken.  The sound had
a distinct popping between tests.  Get a new warning
about volume problems, and it hung at the end.

Output attached.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Robert Reif wrote:
> Jeremy White wrote:
> > Results:
> >  OSS runs reported 48 failures; not clear if that was relevant
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Could you rerun the oss tests with this patch? 
> http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2006-May/026374.html

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

Sound report:
    Kernel 2.6.16-1.2196_FC6 (Fedora Rawhide)
    Sound driver: snd_intel8x0,
    Sound description from lspci:
       00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 
AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)
    64 bit Fedora Rawhide system (x86_64)
    Alsa version 1.0.11-3.rc2.2
    Tested against Wine GIT as of today - 5/17/06

Results:
    Tested with ALSA and OSS (driver emulation = off, hardware 
acceleration = Emulation).
    OSS failed to detect any sound devices until esd was killed 
(sometimes I have 2 copies of esd running for some odd reason).
    ALSA run was continually interrupted (see paused messages). Also, a 
few sounds were the wrong pitch (see test failed).
    ALSA crashed after finishing the tests.
    OSS run also had interruption problems.
        It ran until: wave.c:657:Playing 1 second 440Hz tone at  8000x 8x2
                  WAVE_FORMAT_PCM_CALLBACK_THREAD|WAVE_FORMAT_DIRECT
        ...after which no sound was produced, and I killed the test, 
since it seemed to have frozen.

Log files attached.

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

> OSS run also had interruption problems.
>        It ran until: wave.c:657:Playing 1 second 440Hz tone at  8000x 8x2
>                  WAVE_FORMAT_PCM_CALLBACK_THREAD|WAVE_FORMAT_DIRECT
>        ...after which no sound was produced, and I killed the test, 
> since it seemed to have frozen.

I re-ran the oss tests, and this time they seemed to run (not sure 
what's different).
I paid closer attention to where the sound changes, and made some notes 
about that - see the end of the log.
There's all kinds of problems - hiss, change in pitch (to several diff. 
results), at one point the test switched to my side speakers and turned 
rather loud. I'm still not sure what kind of info you are looking for 
(are those 0.5 sec interruptions normal?).

I am willing to re-run as many times as necessary, since I am very 
interested in getting hl2 to work, and sound is particularly broken.