PulseAudio (formerly PolypAudio) is a cross-platform, networked sound server project.
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.
Key Features
- 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 streaming in files.
Website: www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio
Support: Documentation
Developer: Lennart Poettering, Pierre Ossman, Shahms E, King, and contributors
License: GNU GPL, GNU LGPL
PulseAudio is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Audio Systems | |
|---|---|
| PulseAudio | Integral part of all relevant modern Linux distributions |
| PipeWire | Low-latency, graph based processing engine on top of audio and video devices |
| MPD | Flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music |
| JACK | Professional low-latency sound server API and pair of daemon implementations |
| ALSA | Advanced Linux Sound Architecture |
| sndio | Small audio and MIDI framework |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |