Tag: pulseaudio

Categories
Linux / Gentoo Linux

Wine sound errors

After a while, the sound errors from Wine started to annoy me as they seem to indicate something is wrong while it is not. At the start of each program I see the following errors:

err:alsa:ALSA_CheckSetVolume Could not find 'PCM Playback Volume' element
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:935:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports 
 only playback stream
err:alsa:ALSA_CheckSetVolume Could not find 'PCM Playback Volume' element
ALSA lib seq_hw.c:457:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such 
 file or directory

The first errors are related to my Intel HD audio card which has multiple PCM channels. The result is that none of them are called ‘PCM Playback Volume’ and Wine seems to be hard-coded to search for that specific channel to check upon starting.

Harmless but annoying none the less. A bit of searching seems to indicate that this is something I can’t fix.

The second error about dmix seems to mean that the dmix soundcard that Wine is using does not support recording sound. This is correct as it is a softmix device used to let multiple programs ‘claim’ the soundcard without locking each other out. Beats the hell out of the mess called PulseAudio and was a breeze to set up.

The 3rd error is MIDI related: Wine is trying to access the sequencer device. I can’t figure out why Wine has no option to disable midi support altogether but without that device you will keep getting those errors.

To fix this, enable the MIDI drivers in ALSA and load them on boot, the driver will be called ‘snd-seq-device’. In my case this was found in (kernel 2.6.30):

Device Drivers
<*> Sound card support ---->
    <*> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture --->
        <*> Sequencer support
Categories
Linux / Gentoo Linux

Why Pulseaudio sucks…

A while back, I got really annoyed from the fact that when I was running Gentoo and I decided to play a game (Wine/Cedega) like EVE Online, I either have the sound from EVE-Online, or from my desktop – but not both.

This is usually due to a crappy sound card (no hardware mixing) and a driver which fails to fix this. I knew ALSA had dmix for software mixing but I read somewhere that pulseaudio was the new hot shot in the mixing scene. I was wrong.

You see, after enabling pulseaudio in Gentoo, rebuilding a number of packages to support it (Xine-lib for example) and following the guides to make ALSA-only applications use pulseaudio as well (in fact by looping the sound back from ALSA to pulse and again to ALSA), it should just work ™.

My first attempts were fine, I used aplay to select the pulse channel, played 6 songs at once and all was well. When it was time to make Phonon (KDE4) use the new pulseaudio sink, nothing happened. I even used the workaround as explained on the pulseaudio page – but nothing helped. I finally made the default audio-sink pulseaudio.

Next up: Wine. The first attempt to start Winamp went fine, except for the fact that I didn’t hear no sound. Looking in the logs, I see wine attempting to open the ALSA/Pulseaudio library from ‘/lib32’. For the more perceptive of you: yes, it want 32-bit libraries on my 64-bit system. Normally this is handled by a emulation package but guess what? The Gentoo emulation packages don’t feature these only slightly vital libraries.

After reading the bug page which explained the problem, I found a site of someone who provided the 32-bit binary drivers for ALSA/Pulseaudio. And indeed, after extraction into ‘/lib32’, sound came to life from the mysterious world inside Wine.

Then I tried to start World of Warcraft. The stuttering sound of a screwed up sound mixer emerged from my speakers and no matter how I started the game, the sound was useless. Finally I gave EVE-Online a try and it had the same, horrible sound output…

So I reverted everything I did, read up on how dmix was supposed to work (which seemed like a lot less work after following the ‘simple’ guide on the pulseaudio site), set up a software mixer and made it default and there we go – audio output for all!

Now I don’t know who decided that pulseaudio was ‘lightweight’ and ‘fast’ but I know for sure that its neither – the default dmix extension for ALSA works a million times better…