PulseAudio

PulseAudio (formerly PolypAudio) is a cross-platform, networked sound server project. It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD).

PulseAudio is a sound server, a background process accepting sound input from one or more sources (processes or capture devices) and redirecting it to one or more sinks (sound cards, remote network PulseAudio servers, or other processes).

One of the goals of PulseAudio is to reroute all sound streams through it, including those from processes that attempt to directly access the hardware (like legacy OSS applications). PulseAudio achieves this by providing adapters to applications using other audio systems, like aRts and ESD.

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 1.1

Price Free to download Size 2.0MB License GNU GPL, GNU GLPL Developer Lennart Poettering, Pierre Ossman, Shahms E, King, and contributors Website www.pulseaudio.org System Requirements liboil libsamplerate libsnd libatomic_ops 1.2 Optional: X11 libcap alsa-lib glib 2.0 Avahi jack libasyncns tcpwrap lirc Support Sites: FAQ, Mailing Lists, HOWTO Selected Reviews:

Features include:

• Per-application volume controls
  
• Extensible plugin architecture with support for loadable modules
• Module autoloading
• Compatibility with many popular audio applications
• Support for multiple audio sources and sinks
• Low-latency operation and support for latency measurement
• Zero-copy memory architecture for processor resource efficiency
• Ability to discover other computers using PulseAudio on the local network and play sound through their speakers directly
• Ability to change which output device an application plays sound through while the application is playing sound (without the application needing to support this, and indeed without even being aware that this happened)
• Command-line interface with scripting capabilities
• Sound daemon with command line reconfiguration capabilities
• Built-in sample conversion and resampling capabilities
• "Zero-Copy" architecture
• Combine multiple sound cards into one
• Ability to fully synchronize multiple playback streamsing in files

Last Updated Saturday, February 18 2012 @ 02:35 AM EST