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About PulseAudio

Details

PulseAudio is a networked sound server, similar in theory to the Enlightened Sound Daemon (EsounD). PulseAudio is however much more advanced and has numerous features.

A sound server can serve many functions:

  • Software mixing of multiple audio streams, bypassing any restrictions the hardware has.
  • Network transparency, allowing an application to play back or record audio on a different machine than the one it is running on.
  • Sound API abstraction, alleviating the need for multiple backends in applications to handle the wide diversity of sound systems out there.
  • Generic hardware abstraction, giving the possibility of doing things like individual volumes per application.

PulseAudio comes with many plugin modules. All audio from/to clients and audio interfaces goes through modules.

Manuel Amador created a diagram describing how the different parts of PulseAudio play together. (Not all modules are shown.)

PulseAudio clients can send audio to "sinks" and receive audio from "sources". A client can be GStreamer, xinelib, MPlayer or any other audio application. Only the device drivers/audio interfaces can be either sources or sinks (they are often hardware in- and out-puts).

Current Status

The PulseAudio daemon and utilities are still under heavy development. Although they are generally considered stable, they haven't seen enough testing to warrant a first completely stable release.

API, ABI and the protocol are considered release worthy so effort is spent to not break these. Application developers should not feel uneasy using the client library at this point.

Features

  • Library licensed under LGPL and server daemon under GPL
  • Extensible plugin architecture (by loading dynamic loadable modules with dlopen())
  • Support for static linking of modules, allowing a single binary for all your needs
  • Module autoloading
  • Support for more than one sink/source
  • Good low latency behaviour
  • Very accurate latency measurement for playback and recording.
  • Client side latency interpolation
  • Embeddable into other software (the core is available as C library)
  • Completely asynchronous C API, complemented by two synchronous variants for simple use in synchronous applications
  • Simple command line interface for reconfiguring the daemon while running
  • Flexible, implicit sample type conversion and resampling
  • "Zero-Copy" architecture
  • May be used to combine multiple sound cards to one (with sample rate adjustment)
  • Ability to fully synchronize multiple playback streams

PulseAudio is intended to provide lower latency than the software mixers dmix and esd.

Supported Operating Systems

  • Linux (any modern distribution)
  • Solaris
  • FreeBSD
  • Native Win32 (no cygwin)

Related Software

The following auxiliary GUI tools have been developed for PulseAudio:

The following plugins for third-party software have been developed:

The following third-party software also has support for PulseAudio:

Screenshots

Since PulseAudio is a daemon process that sits in the background it's difficult to make a screenshot of it. However we can provide you with a screenshot of the auxiliary tools mentioned above:

http://0pointer.de/public/pulse-screenshot-small.png

(For the full size image follow this link.)

Distributions

PulseAudio is currently available in the following distributions:

Earlier versions of PulseAudio, then known as Polypaudio, can be found in quite a few distributions:

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