Jan Zerebecki wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 01:50:09AM +0100, Tomas Carnecky wrote:
nifty features, like per-app volume, transparent sink switching etc, some of which are impossible to emulate through the alsa pulse plugin.
Which features can't be used through the alsa->pulse plugin? And is there any technical reason for that or just missing functionality in that plugin?
All wine apps are identified as 'ALSA plug-in [wine-preloader]' in the PA daemon, so you can't set per-app volume and sinks since all wine apps show up under the same name. That is a technical limitation of the alsa plugin and can't be fixed (well, unless the plugin does some /proc/self voodoo to extract the true name). However that does not make the plugin unusable, but per-app settings is a major functionality of PA, so it's kind of bad if that doesn't work. I have gotten winealsa to work with a patched alsa pulse plugin, but whether my patch will be accepted remains uncertain. There are some fundamental differences between ALSA and PA, for example ALSA uses frames and PA uses microseconds and I suspect there are rounding issues involved that make winealsa hang in certain situations. I'll need some help from the PA developers to fix that, but so far it's been quite difficult to get hold of them.
tom