On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 05:57:04PM -0700, Chris Robinson wrote:
On Sunday, October 23, 2011 8:28:45 PM Jonathan McCrohan wrote:
Would someone with a better knowledge of Wine and/or ALSA be able to assist me in tracking down the source of this bug?
Part of the problem is the way Wine attempts to "detect" a default format from ALSA. ALSA doesn't report a default format, though, so Wine attempts to see what it's capable of and reports that instead. Apparently ALSA is capable of handling up to 10,000 channels, and Wine has no idea how to report that back to the Windows app.
IMO, the "fix" would be to make winealsa default to something sane, like 44.1khz 16-bit stereo.
I agree, this is a better solution than trying to detect it from the backends. Looking at >2-channel audio setups is near the top of my TODO list; Scott Ritchie even asked me about it at WineConf this year. Reworking GetMixFormat() is probably going to be part of that.
Jonathan: If you are confident with the ALSA API, I would be happy to review a patch that does this and/or fixes multichannel audio. If you aren't confident with ALSA and value your sanity, I would suggest you stay far, far away :)
A configuration option (in winecfg/control panel) wouldbe needed to set it into a different mode. Windows has something similar to this for its own audio device configuration in the control panel.
My reaction to this is "urrrrrrrghhhhhhh". I'd much rather tuck it away in a registry entry than put it in winecfg for everyone to mess with. I was surprised to see that option on my Win 7 VM, although the control is actually inactive.
But, there's an additional complication. The order Windows expects for >4 channels is different than what ALSA provides. For example, ALSA places the front-center/lfe channels after the rear-left/right, while Windows places them after front-left/right. So either Wine will need to tell ALSA to expect a different order (I'm not sure if you can in an easy way), or Wine will have to reorder the samples itself before writing to the device.
Yeah, remapping the channels in winealsa.drv is probably the solution, unfortunately. I'll know more once I start investigating the various backends' multichannel support.
Andrew