More up to date information can be found at Sound

Audio

Win32 has several overlapping audio systems.

• winmm.dll provides the classic audio calls like PlaySound, and in wine, handles loading the appropriate backend driver (e.g. winealsa.drv)

• mmdevapi.dll provides some of the Vista style "Core Audio" calls
• dsound.dll provides another audio API used by many DirectX games

• xaudio2.dll is the Vista-era replacement for DirectSound (not yet implemented in wine)

This block diagram describes Windows XP, Vista/Win7, and wine-1.1.34's sound support, along with two proposals for how to restructure Wine's audio support for the future. The two alternatives were to base it on OpenAL, or to base it on Vista's core audio component WASAPI.

Maarten Lankhorst is currently proceeding with the OpenAL route as an experiment. The jury is still out on whether this is the right way to go for the future.

Links

• http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495 "Wine and Pulseaudio should work together"

• December 2009 thread on wine-devel where Maarten declares OpenAL proven, and Roderick is skeptical

• MeasuringAudioLatency - Notes on how to measure audio latency (some applications can't easily tolerate more than a few milliseconds)

• MSDN core audio documentation

• MSDN blog post about core audio

• MSDN XAudio2 documentation

• XP architecture: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms790062.aspx

• Vista/win7 architecture: http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2005/09/23/473351.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd316780%28VS.85%29.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd316556%28VS.85%29.aspx

• Directsound: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms789522.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms790407.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms790572.aspx

• Xaudio architecture: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee415698%28VS.85%29.aspx, http://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?sid=25937