I'm more interested in a direct pulseaudio gateway for Wine... since by
application sound control is the biggest thing here for most people....
wine is treated as one big audio blob. Pulse sees it as one thing. In
effect, wine handles it's own audio (by talking with ALSA or OSS) then
passes that through to the outside sound server... which in most cases
would simply be ALSA or OSS itself, but in this case it gets passed to
ALSA/OSS and through this talks to pulse. I call that pretty messy when
we could just directly talk to pulse audio (easily, too) and have by
applications control. Pulse is going to be in pretty much every distro
soon. For a 1.0 release, no one wants to go out of their way to
accomodate the shortcomings of our audio control.
Even directly sending the blobof output to pulse directly at first
would simplify things. I know this means yet asnother audio output
method to maintain, and for various reasons many are against it. But
this is similar to us needing to improve ALSA support rather recently.
Pulseaudio does directly support ALSA, but it's a bit demanding on how
it need to work to be perfect.
ALSA, Pulseaudio, and OSS are probably the big three we need support
for. Pulse is a drop in replacement for things like Network Sound, and
way easier to configure and use.
Sorry for expanding the topic so much.