Article: PulseAudio, the future of Linux sound

PulseAudio is a sound server that has been developed with the intention of replacing the Enlightenment Sound Daemon (ESD). PulseAudio has several significant advantages and improvements over ESD:

• Per-application volume controls
• An extensible plug-in architecture with support for loadable modules
• Compatibility with many popular audio applications
• Support for multiple audio sources and sinks
• Low-latency operation and support for latency measurement
• A zero-copy memory architecture for processor resource efficiency
• A command-line interface with re-sampling capabilities
• A sound daemon with command line reconfiguration capabilities
• Built-in sample conversion and re-sampling capabilities
• The ability to combine multiple sound cards into one
• The ability to synchronize multiple playback streams

The first Linux distribution to integrate PulseAudio was Fedora Core 8. At version 0.9.9, PulseAudio is close to a 1.0 release and will hopefully be integrated to the next releases of other Linux distributions. I believe that PulseAudio is the future of Linux sound and 2008 will be the year when Linux makes some big leaps forward. I know there are a lot of skeptics who believe that Microsoft will always be dominant but Linux is certainly gaining ground quickly.

 

I believe that Ubuntu is moving forward with PulseAudio as well, from what I hear. I'd like to see it replace the sound server in KDE and Gnome, though.

 

I'm looking forward to it!

 

Nice to read your comments I use Fedora Core 8 and I have to say the implementation is near flawless. It's really superb