Comment 6 for bug 210572

(to Scott:) Did you upgrade from Gutsy? Hardy uses pulseaudio by default, but during upgrade it wasn't always automatically enabled for each user; one needs to go to the sound settings and enable 'Enable software sound mixing (ESD)'. When pulseaudio isn't playing audio, it may release the audio device so ALSA applications can grab it. But if you're playing music or have a Youtube movie opened in Firefox for example, wine's ALSA module won't be able to open the device since it's in use by pulseaudio. The solution is then to use OSS in wine with padsp. In short:
- make sure pulseaudio is active
- play something using totem/rhythmbox/whatever
- output audio in wine (it'll fail unless OSS is used with padsp)
solution:
* install 32bit libpulsedsp.so in /usr/lib32
* run `padsp winecfg` and select OSS output (check that wave in&out have a pulseaudio device)
* run your wine sound application using `padsp wine mysoundapp.exe`