Wine runs many Windows programs nicely these days, including more and more serious music applications. Dave profiles some of those applications running under the latest & greatest Wine 1.2
On July 16 the Wine development team announced the public release of Wine 1.2, the “WINdows Emulator”, aka “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. I hadn’t been keeping up with the project, so I decided to revisit it to see how Wine’s audio/MIDI support had evolved. Past releases enabled a variety of small and mid-sized sound applications to run, but would the latest & greatest be able to meet the demands of at least some of the more popular music programs for Windows ? Read on to learn the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about running Windows music applications in Linux under the latest Wine.
New releases of Wine are somewhat predictable in their content. The software is not actually an emulator, it’s a compatibility layer that enables the operation of Windows binaries under Linux. In essence, the project is in a perpetual chase scene with Windows releases, and I have deep respect for Wine’s goal of full compatibility. However, the developers’ work is cut out for them. Any attempt at emulating a severely closed operating system is bound to include some instability due to the inaccessibility of source code. It is a great credit to the Wine developers that their software performs as well as it does with a wide variety of Windows applications, including music and sound applications. Over the years I’ve watched Wine expand its audio/MIDI support to keep up with development in both Windows and Linux, a rather tricky achievement.