James Hawkins wrote:
On 4/21/06, Roderick Colenbrander thunderbird2k@gmx.net wrote:
Hi,
One of the things users complain about is wine's sound quality. Problems which you experience range from crackling sound in media players to buffer underruns and high latencies in games.
For a part the problem is caused by crappy audio drivers and soundcards. None the less are there things in wine which can be improved to reduce the issues. I don't know this part of the code well but I believe the alsa driver is far from optimal and second the dsound contains some bugs too.
In this SoC project a student would need to look into the causes of wine's bad sound quality and try to improve it by fixing winealsa and other parts.
The only problem I have with this project idea is the ambiguity of 'improve dsound/winmm'. At what point is dsound and winmm considered to be improved? It would be nice to see a list of specific items that need to be fixed, and I mean more specific than crackling playback and high latencies. A specific project that would probably help with this situation is to combine all wine audio drivers into one driver, wineaudio. The common functionality of the drivers can be factored out, reducing code size while at the same time minimizing the chance for more bugs.
actually there are different issues (and potential projects): - factorize all mm drivers into a single one o to be done for wave, midi, mixer winmm interfaces o potentially, make use of a portability audio library (beware of latency issues, even for winmm here) o fix the way mm winmm interfaces are chosen from the available ones (tricky when several cards are present on the same machine) o to be done for dsound wave interfaces - make dsound work in all cases. this covers o rework no dsound interfaces in audio drivers o fix the latency of dsound (may tackle thread priority at some point) o work on the audio stream mixing in dsound - the crossing of the two previous items o fix the way dsound interfaces are gotten from mm drivers (still a dirty hack today)
A+