Oh. My. God.

I have returned from quite a long hiatus in blog entry writing to write about how I got sound working in Wine with a stock install of Ubuntu 12.10 and the (mostly) default Pulseaudio setup that Ubuntu uses. It took me 2 months and tens of Google searches for things like “Wine Ubuntu 12.10 no sound” and “What the hell? No pulseaudio sound with wine1.5.”

All I wanted to do was play Starcraft 2 without booting in to Windows. I’m fine with the lower frame rate when running under Wine. I JUST WANTED SOUND!

TLDR#

  1. Open regedit (wine regedit)
  2. Go to HKey_Current_User->Software->Wine->Drivers
  3. Edit the Audio key, which is probably set to ‘oss’ (also known as the 1990s), changing the value to ‘alsa’
  4. Close regedit
  5. Open winecfg
  6. Click Audio Tab
  7. Click Test Audio button
  8. Play Starcraft 2 with sound

Screenshot afterwards: wine alsa audio key

My Setup (in case it has some relevance to the matter)#

  • Thinkpad T510
  • Ubuntu 12.10
  • Pulseaudio 2.1 (I think it’s from the stock Ubuntu repositories)
  • The wine1.5 package from the ubuntu-wine PPA (“apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa”)
  • Starcraft 2

Symptoms#

  • No sound in winecfg’s audio tab when clicking the ‘Test Audio’ button
  • No sound in Starcraft 2

Complaining#

Before I installed Ubuntu 12.10, I was running Linux Mint 13 (I think) and everything worked fine. When I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10, I could no longer get sound.

I was unwilling to replace Pulseaudio with ALSA because of my upcoming Raspberry Pi As A Networked Pulseaudio Device project, so I just didn’t play Starcraft and started watching other people play on Twitch.tv.

The SOLUTION#

Thanks to the forum post linked at the end of this article on bbs.archlinux.org, I had finally been given a solution!

See the TLDR for the solution.

Leave a comment and let me know how I did#