Feature Request

Nice effort and initiative.
Currently I'm having this problem with Elite Dangerous, game fully supports it, but all I'm getting from the Proton is stereo. Now, I'm not using the latest Proton (v7 and experimental) because the game doesn't work with it, but earlier Proton versions are stereo.

Quick update re. Prince of Persia 2008: I was wrong, it doesn't work with IndirectSound. There is sound coming from the center speaker (mainly dialogue), but many other sound effects don't play at all and there is next to nothing in the other speakers either. In the intro, for instance, when the Prince falls down the ledge and a bunch of rocks fall on his head, there is no sound. Right aftewards, when Elika shoves him up against the wall, no sound either. A minute after that, during the first sword fight, there's no sword clanging sound.

@Xavron Yeah, I agree upmixing is better than nothing. Personally, I prefer playing the affected games in true surround using the Windows partition on my laptop, though.

Yeah, and hence what I stated in the front lol. If you want true then there's a lot a play. Wine added multi-channel to alsa long ago. Probably it broke and is incompatible with various changes.

I'm not sure if anyone here even looked if it can support eg alsa plugin with pipewire or if Wine is just broken.

Well, to be fair, many games do work in surround sound using Proton, and it seems more recent ones work better than older ones, too. For instance: Deathloop, Alien: Isolation, Doom Eternal, Divinity: Original Sin DC, BioShock Remastered, Dying Light, even F.E.A.R. 2. They all play in surround sound, so Proton definitely does support surround sound. And I know Wine does, too. It's just still pretty spotty and it looks like it's not one big bug, but many smaller ones, often probably down to a per-game basis.

Although, I'm sure the bug that affects Styx and LoF 2, if that was fixed, probably a whole bunch of other games would start working, too.

Ah, I see. It could definitely be stuff in the Wine code that hasn't been implemented for specific situations. Looking at the Wine source briefly, I see FAudio does indeed include support https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/1d178982ae5a73b18f367026c8689b56789c39fd/libs/faudio/include/FAudio.h#L458

So it might be games that can't make use of that. I won't be looking into it any further. But, I'm sure the Proton devs are aware of stuff already.

In case it helps, regarding Prince of Persia 2008: I ran the GOG version using Lutris Wine builds and also only had stereo output initially. However, when I upgraded to a Lutris Wine build >= 6.13 (it's been a while so I'm not exactly sure about the version, but it should be in this area), surround sound suddenly worked fine.
World in Conflict exhibited the same problem and upgrading to a Lutris Wine build >= 6.13 fixed surround sound for it as well.

In case it helps, regarding Prince of Persia 2008: I ran the GOG version using Lutris Wine builds and also only had stereo output initially. However, when I upgraded to a Lutris Wine build >= 6.13 (it's been a while so I'm not exactly sure about the version, but it should be in this area), surround sound suddenly worked fine. World in Conflict exhibited the same problem and upgrading to a Lutris Wine build >= 6.13 fixed surround sound for it as well.

Interesting! There's no way to run Steam games through "regular" Wine like you describe, right? I tried through Steam using the latest Proton and GE-Protons, also older versions, with and with out DSOAL and IndirectSound. I also tried launching the games from Lutris using the Steam runner and the options to disable Lutris runtime and use system libraries. I either got stereo or corrupted surround with a lot of SFX not playing at all.

It's good to know that the GOG version works when using plain Wine.

It's good to know that the GOG version works when using plain Wine.

I think you might have misunderstood me. I wasn't running the GOG version in plain Wine but rather in the Wine build provided by Lutris, which carries a lot of patches compared to a plain Wine build.

There's no way to run Steam games through "regular" Wine like you describe, right?

It might be possible to run Steam games in arbitrary Wine prefixes by installing the Windows Steam client in the target prefix and install the Windows game from there. Didn't test this, though.

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6138#issuecomment-1253739193

Ah, thanks for clarifying. Yeah, it sounds like if I have the game on Steam, not GOG or in some other form, it'll be tricky to run it using Lutris' Wine build. Too bad! Well, gonna wishlist it on GOG, then. Hopefully, Proton catches up some day and fixes surround support for this game and others.

There's also a chance that if this native Pipewire driver for wine gets off the ground, it could support 7.1/atmos https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/1938#note_1499194

That would be awesome. I'm guessing Pipewire will be in Linux Mint 21.1 when that comes in December.

This may not be the right place to ask, but for those who have experience using Pipewire: is it the same as Pulse, where we can just plug an HDMI cable into our graphics card and AVR and bada bing, surround sound works? With selectable profiles for 5.1, 7.1 etc in the OS's sound settings? Is there an app that does what pavucontrol does?

That would be awesome. I'm guessing Pipewire will be in Linux Mint 21.1 when that comes in December.

This may not be the right place to ask, but for those who have experience using Pipewire: is it the same as Pulse, where we can just plug an HDMI cable into our graphics card and AVR and bada bing, surround sound works? With selectable profiles for 5.1, 7.1 etc in the OS's sound settings? Is there an app that does what pavucontrol does?

So long as you install the proper components (Pw-alsa, pw-jack, pw-pulse) then all the audio controls will mix and become one, all your old pulse controls such as pavucontrol will work exactly as they did before, and can now control jack apps.

Good to hear. So those are simply additional packages one needs to install, then?

Good to hear. So those are simply additional packages one needs to install, then?

Yep, the main PW package, and all its other audio servers, just note it will outright replace them, but all Pulse apps and commands should work, such as it auto importing your configs or sinks.

For anybody interested, Dishonored and Styx: Shards of Darkness work in 5.1 surround sound with the latest version of Proton Experimental on Linux Mint 21.1. Brilliant!

Will check the other titles I had problems with in due time.

One of the related technologies is spatial sound rendering. I've been working on one for PipeWire recently. It can easily render 7.1 to headphones (we should be able to do that automatically some day), as well as work with dynamically positioned objects (custom demos are working). However, I've got no real source of spatial sound (not just 7.1, but dynamic sources) to develop a viable API for exposing spatial objects to clients.

I have opened an RFC regarding this: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3035 and would like to cooperate on creating more immersive audio experiences in games.

Proton/Wine do already provide some implementation for ISpatialAudioClient, but not really rendering it spatially. Proper support for this should enhance user experience and game quality, so comments from Proton developers are welcomed!

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6138#issuecomment-1435493791

By sources, do you mean games and programs that actually use spacial sound? If so Returnal might be a good start with its Aura 3D support. I don't think it's atmos can apply to headphones however, needs a proper speaker set up.

Had no idea it was you working on the native PW driver, hope to see that soon!

if an Atmos game uses ISpatialAudioClient, Proton can try to get object props and at least dump them. Then something needs to be done at the driver level, likely requiring WIP Wine-PipeWire driver.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been known to require ISpatialAudioClient, as per initial commit message.

Had no idea it was you working on the native PW driver, hope to see that soon!

Not me, I'm not into Wine at all. Not sure whether the developer is on GH.

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6138#issuecomment-1435498469

Ah, sorry, I didn't follow the links right.

As for support Aura 3D seems to work fine already in my case, with objects sounding like they're from above or below. I guess its just atmos amongst other formats that require ISpatialAudioClient support.

As for support Aura 3D seems to work fine already in my case, with objects sounding like they're from above or below. I guess its just atmos amongst other formats that require ISpatialAudioClient support.

Does it just send stereo to headphones and do all the processing inside the game engine? We thought many games did so, but some relied on platform APIs to make 3D audio

As for support Auro 3D seems to work fine already in my case, with objects sounding like they're from above or below. I guess its just atmos amongst other formats that require ISpatialAudioClient support.

Does it just send stereo to headphones and do all the processing inside the game engine? We thought many games did so, but some relied on platform APIs to make 3D audio

I'm gonna assume internal processing for Auro as its it seems to have two implemenations, one where its just a basic 7.1 signal and one where its a library you can add to games to do spacial audio on headphones with no driver required.

In this games case it chose the embedded 3D simulation , much like how you can run atmos for headphones (no idea if atmos for headphones can accept real atmos tracks) and sending its Auro mix to a real 7.1 setup presumably wont work. Game also never requested any downloads or drivers for Aura to work so its gotta be internally processed.

Games atmos mix is however real and requires a dac and all that fun stuff.

Atmos mix and Atmos for headphones are ambiguous terms. Typically games are going to use ISpatialAudioClient, not an Atmos encoded file like movies do. So Wine can just see coordinates, transform those and feed into PipeWire spatializer.

Atmos for headphones and Windows Sonic do roughly the same as my PW spatializer: apply HRTFs to make sound appear from a coordinate point

Atmos mix and Atmos for headphones are ambiguous terms. Typically games are going to use ISpatialAudioClient, not an Atmos encoded file like movies do. So Wine can just see coordinates, transform those and feed into PipeWire spatializer.

Atmos for headphones and Windows Sonic do roughly the same as my PW spatializer: apply HRTFs to make sound appear from a coordinate point

Right, well Auro3d in this case is going with the atmos for headphones approach, just with internal processing, even has a DLL for it. (But it does have its own real codec for 7.1 systems, it's just not used here)

But as said, its Atmos Mix is very real and relies on ISpatialAudioClient, sorry about the confusion.

Alright. Auro3D is then unrelated to the question: it's a module for the game engine that detects sound hardware and performs the best possible rendering on its own, just sending classic 2.0 or 7.1 to the OS audio stack. Nothing to do to support that from Proton and PipeWire. If something is broken and 7.1 doesn't work, that's a bug, not missing feature.

Atmos mix based on spatial client is essentially what I am asking developers about: Proton could probably set those properties to PipeWire (method is to be determined) and PipeWire can render arbitrarily positioned sources to headsets

The main factor needed for ISpatialAudioClient is collaborative work, I want to hear opinion of developers involved in Wine audio stack to shape the upcoming API

Borderlands 2 (49520) and Borderlands The Pre-Sequel (261640) has had broken surround for as long as I can remember, at least on my system. Basically, audio from behind is completely muted but audio from the front plays fine. Finally solved it with protontricks <appid> sound=alsa which gives me working surround audio in these games.

Using Debian testing, with PipeWire (inc. pipewire-pulse and pipewire-alsa)
Proton 7.0-6
7.1 virtual surround using PipeWire, going into stereo headphones. Not that it matters. If this isn't working then surely it's not working on a real surround speaker setup either.

Not sure if this is related to this issue, but I noticed winecfg only has up to 5.1 surround as an option for Monster Hunter Wilds and The Finals. My system (cachyos/proton-cachyos) has 7.1 surround support which I confirmed by testing all the channels. I also confirmed the side channels in 7.1 surround do not work in game by turning on only those channels and not hearing anything.

I'm not sure if this is a game specific limitation, but it seems to be more an issue with wine/proton itself. I did find this Wine bug report stating this exact issue https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56664

I also have a reddit thread (with not much helpful info) here

EDIT: as mentioned in the reddit thread above, I did more testing and found that while winecfg says 5.1 for all my games, most games actually do output 7.1 (as tested by turning off every channel except the side channels). However, The Finals still only outputs 5.1 surround. According to this the finals should be outputting 7.0 surround, which I also saw when playing on windows.

as mentioned in the reddit thread above, I did more testing and found that while winecfg says 5.1 for all my games, most games actually do output 7.1

From my testing, even though Wine only exposes an option for 5.1 surround sound, it actually seems to pass through an arbitrary(?) number of channels. Not only could I use 7.1 in games (if they rely on auto-detection, it might not always work, though), I could successfully pass through even more channels. The number of channels passed through can be easily seen when using qpwgraph with pipewire-pulse.

I actually found the same thing. The highest you can set in winecfgis 5.1 and many games will still play back 7.1 sound on my 7.1 system using Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon.

Also, though, some games won't work if you choose the 7.1 Surround output profile in Linux Mint's sound settings. They require Linux to be set to 5.1.

For example, in Fallout: New Vegas, you'll hear screeching/distorted or no sound in several channels. When choosing 5.1 Surround in Linux, you get 5.1 surround sound. Rear channels stay silent.

Running the same game in Windows 11 with 7.1 works fine.

@Jinra I'm having the same issue as you are with The Finals and no audio from the side channels in 7.1. It actually seems to be affecting ALL Unreal Engine games (though I see on your Reddit thread that Marvel Rivals apparently works properly, and that's Unreal. Maybe it's using a different audio middleware?). I've confirmed it in System Shock Remake, Sifu, Dishonored 1, and even running a Windows build of the Unreal Editor through Proton and setting up an audio test level. Non-Unreal based games that I've tried respect all 7.1 channels.

I've tried on both Steam Deck running SteamOS and my desktop running Bazzite with the same results.

@DKesserich

Unfortunately this just causes my game to crash at startup now

FWIW I'm seeing the same behavior in red dead redemption 2, which doesn't use unreal engine, where I only get 5.1 surround. I can confirm it's not 7.1 with the side channels muted as it gives me a picture of my setup in the came config

It seems audio passthrough of Atmos to speakers is also not working. pcm 5.1 and 7.1 works fine but on my yamaha receiver in hellblade 2 dolby atmos for speaker isn't passing through Atmos to receiver.

From kodi atmos passthrough is working for music and movie content.

os: nobara

Without knowing the details, I'm just guessing but most likely Kodi is to some extent bypassing Linux audio APIs to directly transmit the Atmos bitstream. Meanwhile Wine likely lacks such capability and its audio backends likewise do not know about Atmos.

Dolby Atmos can be transmitted via various formats.
Static content, such as music and videos, typically either use Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby TrueHD. Real-time applications, such as games, most likely use Dolby MAT 2.0.
The transmission of Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby TrueHD ist already possible since these are basically pre-encoded streams that can be passed through. Real-time applications require live-encoding, which is currently not supported on Linux AFAIK.

For pipewire, there is already an issue for supporting immersive audio with speakers.

It is already possible to drive immersive audio systems on Linux if games utilize OpenAL.

You can either follow this guide, which is more difficult but provides better results or configure OpenAL to use the Tetraphonic Surround Matrix Encoding feature, which is able to encode surround and some height information into a stereo stream. This stereo stream has to be decoded by a matrix decoder. In my experience, DTS Neural X can do this best.