sound playback in games run through Wine

[Lovot]

This may, or may not actually belong here, but I have been having a problem with audio playback when running games through wine, the current one giving me grief is Skyrim, this does not seem to be restricted to any Wine version. The Wine sound test works, weather or not there are other audio streams going to the card I'm using.

Once Skyrim starts things get weird, if there are other audio streams on startup, the sound for the Bethesda intro works, if there are no other sound streams it doesn't.
The button sounds in the main menu do not work if there were other sound streams on startup, if there are no sound streams on startup button sounds work, but it seems like the game gets a lock on the sound card, no other applications can use the card until the game closes.
No in-game music works at all, if the main menu has music that doesn't work either
No voices work
all other sounds work

I have no asound.conf, or .asoundrc, they seem to cause problems whenever I try to configure ALSA that way, ALSA configuration is basically dark sorcery to me at this point.
This might be able to be partly solved by creating a dummy card for the game to lock on to that re-samples everything to 44100 HZ, then sends it to the actual card, but, I don't know how to do that.

Pulseaudio always causes more problems for me than it solves,

[Ionen]

Issues with audio in wine are rarely related to the alsa/pulse audio backend. Usually it's because of the faudio's xaudio implementation not working as expected or being outdated (or not used, but it's a default flag on gentoo). I wish gentoo kept faudio releases more up to date too, they constantly fix things (thankfully there's faudio-9999).

Either way, a usually viable solution is to just use native xaudio. A "winetricks xact" or "winetricks xact_x64" (if the application is 64bit) usually does the job.

I never played skyrim though, so I can't really say more.
Edit: Especially without seeing some logs to know what's going on, libasound(alsa) is also able to resample/mix as needed, given proper configs anyway, but I don't really know what gentoo does by default for libasound (I use JACK personally with a fancy zita's alsa2jack bridge given the alsa jack plugins are wonky with Wine. PulseAudio would probably give you less grief in general given you make sure applications actually use it rather than alsa, I may start using PA with a JACK sink again myself and try to weed out libasound-users for things not jack-native).

[Lovot]

[Ionen]

Yeah this is alsa after all. My best guess is that something is trying to either use the hardware device directly, or "somehow" using a different dmix device (ipc_key in config files is used to identify them). What output device is wine using? (mentioned in winecfg, system default?). Output of "aplay -L" and "aplay -l" may be useful.

I typically find it better to use a proper .asoundrc/asound.conf and disable all those weirdo outputs I never use with a single plug:dmix as default (my aplay -L only shows 2 devices ). I'd give you my config as example but mine is a weird setup with a loopback device.

Maybe someone else can help better.

[Lovot]

i'm using card 0, 1 also works

[Chiitoo]

This may or may not help at all, but if I remember things correctly, I've seen some stuff pretty much ignore ALSA configuration, default or user, and do what ever they please.

This was with native Linux builds though, and while I have had some Windows applications give me similar trouble, I can't remember the details...

Main offender being FMOD, which the Unity game engine used at least at some point. I have no idea what Skyrim does. Definitely seems strange that parts of it work differently at times. Perhaps the intro is more like a video file, or something to that effect, while the other things do, well, other things?

One problem I remember with FMOD, was that it wasn't even seeing my custom 'pcm', which I noticed by messing with their example code. Somehow I noticed that adding a 'hint' to the ALSA configuration helped, and indeed allowed me to make it use what I wanted it to use.

So for example, my 'pcm.!default' looks like this:

[Ionen]

Like I said it won't be much of a reference either (probably better off looking up normal examples in google). Personally I set my own dmix device like

[Lovot]

Quick question: would a card with a hardware mixer still work when something attempts to directly use the card?

[Ionen]

[Ant P.]

ALSA supports hardware mixing fine. Worked on my au8830 (theoretical max of 32 streams), at least for normal desktop and game use.