Comment 210 for bug 371897

> Pulseaudio is a return to the ancient, pre-dmix-by-default architecture of
> driver + daemon (that produced the now dead esd and arts daemons) to provide
> software mixing to cards that don't have hardware mixing. It SHOULD have been a
> drop-in replacement for dmix, but it's far from it.

Pulseaudio is far superior to dmix from the end-user functionality - there is a trivial interface provided to adjust volume for each application individually with a live feed of sound level alongside it to see the effect, applications can be transferred from one sound to another without interrupting playback and with no need to support this transition in any way in the application itself, this includes hot-plug support for sound devises such as usb headphones, bluetooth headsets and soundcards connected to remote computers. Try running 'padevchooser' on Ubuntu 9.04 and explore the options there to see what I am talking about.

I was a sceptic of PA seeing it as just another ESD replacements, but the fact is PulseAudio is much more - it has finally brought real and usable control over the sound in Linux systems. All other options that we currently have in Linux do not even come close.

JACK is only needed for sound editing, where you must have guaranteed real-time latency (which Wine does not provide anyway) and it is possible that FPS players could benefit by disabling PA and using ALSA directly to gain a few miliseconds in audio latency. However for the rest of Wine users PulseAudio is the ultimate option in usability.