i didn't know that. i was using alsa and pulseaudio with my
soundblaster x-fi extreme gamer, i knew you could make some changes
but i was sure you needed pulse or alsa for the sound as a software
wrapper while using wine.
also i had this problem along time ago and i cant remember what i
did to fix it.
This, is the thing that annoys me about pulseaudio - it gets installed by default ; no
attempt is made to interrogate the hardware at install time to determine if one actually
needs it - even if you have both onboard sound and a 'real' soundcard active, you don't
really need PA (you just use the single mixer of the onboard chipset and patch the output
to line-in of your 'real' soundcard)...
...PA was implemented for one reason and one reason alone afaict - crappy onboard sound
chipsets that don't include hardware mixer elements (in the silicon). As we know, pretty
much all motherboards now ship with onboard sound and to keep production costs down, they
don't bother using a (more expensive) chipset (with hardware mixers) - it really is that
simple. As it's installed by default, it's created this mindset in people that PA is 'good',
'mandatory' or some sort of 'desirable feature' - this is not the case.
Btw, in the last decade (while my son was still at home growing up ;), Windows had exactly
the same issues with games & onboard sound. In the Windows case, the software mixers are
part of the soundcard drivers (not as a tertiary app like PA is)...not that it matters,
as the effective solution was to disable onboard sound and put in a $20 emu10k1 instead,
and then all the crashes/problems literally disappeared. Unfortunately speaking, mobo
manufacturers nowadays aren't exactly generous with spare PCI/PCIe slots, and so for
many folks (who buy 'budget' motherboards) the option to add another soundcard is not
always viable - they have some other card(s) in the spare slots...
...if I'm right, the alsa sound drivers will eventually incorporate the software mixers
into that driver layer -- I'm not sure if that would remedy any issues perse, but it
would kill off PA in quick fashion (at least, I really hope so 8)