PulseAudio
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Lennart Poettering, Pierre Ossman, Shahms E. King, Tanu Kaskinen, Colin Guthrie, Arun Raghavan, David Henningsson |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 17 July 2004 |
| Stable release |
10.0 / 19 January 2017
|
| Repository | git://anongit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio, https://github.com/pulseaudio/pulseaudio |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, OS X and Microsoft Windows |
| Platform | ARM, PowerPC, x86 / IA-32, x86-64, and MIPS architecture |
| Type | |
| License | GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1. |
| Website | pulseaudio |
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed by freedesktop.org. It runs on Linux, the BSDs including Mac OS X, Solaris and Microsoft Windows operating systems, although the Windows version has not been updated since 2011.
PulseAudio is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1.
It was created in 2004 under the name Polypaudio but was renamed in 2006 to PulseAudio.
PulseAudio runs 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.
In a typical installation scenario under Linux, the user configures ALSA to use a virtual device provided by PulseAudio. Thus, applications using ALSA will output sound to PulseAudio, which then uses ALSA itself to access the real sound card. PulseAudio also provides its own native interface to applications that want to support PulseAudio directly, as well as a legacy interface for ESD applications, making it suitable as a drop-in replacement for ESD.
For OSS applications, PulseAudio provides the padsp utility, which replaces device files such as /dev/dsp, tricking the applications into believing that they have exclusive control over the sound card. In reality, their output is rerouted through PulseAudio.
...
Wikipedia