http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495
--- Comment #106 from Ben Klein shacklein@gmail.com 2009-06-16 21:42:09 --- (In reply to comment #105)
Pulseaudio is a return to the ancient, pre-dmix-by-default architecture of driver + daemon (that produced the now dead esd and arts daemons) to provide software mixing to cards that don't have hardware mixing. It SHOULD have been a drop-in replacement for dmix, but it's far from it.
Pulseaudio is far superior to dmix from the end-user functionality
Not for Wine (currently), nor is that an issue relating to this bug. It's not developer-friendly. Your discussion of end-user features is irrelevant to this discussion. It is still a sound daemon, with all the limitations thereof (e.g. no hardware mixing), and plug pulse still SHOULD have been a drop-in replacement for dmix.
I was a sceptic of PA seeing it as just another ESD replacements, but the fact is PulseAudio is much more - it has finally brought real and usable control over the sound in Linux systems. All other options that we currently have in Linux do not even come close.
So fix it. Write a per-stream volume control plugin for ALSA/dmix or JACK.
JACK is only needed for sound editing, where you must have guaranteed real-time latency (which Wine does not provide anyway)
Wine's support for latency is not the real issue here, nor are you correct about JACK *only* being needed for sound editing, but that's all off-topic here.
and it is possible that FPS players could benefit by disabling PA and using ALSA directly to gain a few miliseconds in audio latency. However for the rest of Wine users PulseAudio is the ultimate option in usability.
Not when it doesn't work. And "a few milliseconds" is much more significant than you may think, especially when it's adding to already existing latency issues (which is the current problem with winealsa and plug pulse).
Regardless, you're not adding much (if anything) to this discussion ... Which option are you voting for, the "winepulse driver" option or the "fix winealsa" option?