I also think that a move to jack would be best, even for general purpose non-audio apps. I've tried (unsuccessfully thus far) to get jack to include a blocking io api that could be used to make it easy for existing apps to be ported. My thought was that most general purpose apps wouldn't mind using jack but don't need to jump through any hoops if they don't need extremely low latencies and stream synchronization. Why rewrite your whole app if it only uses audio when a dialog box pops up or new mail arrives? The api in its working but unfinished form is at http://www.sf.net/projects/bio2jack if anyone is interested. It is basically the wine jack implementation as a backend and it works quite well for xmms.
That's good to hear!
One thing I've just thought of is whether for replicating the windows multimedia system (codecs etc) using gstreamer might not be quite appropriate - at least for DirectShow. I don't really know how much Wine has in this respect though.
-- Mike Hearn m.hearn@signal.qinetiq.com QinetiQ - Malvern Technology Center