PulseAudio
| PulseAudio | |
|---|---|
Screenshot | |
| Developer(s) |
|
| Initial release | 17 July 2004 |
| Stable release | 17.0
/ 12 January 2024 |
| Repository | gitlab |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Illumos, Solaris, macOS, and Microsoft Windows (not maintained) |
| Platform | ARM, PowerPC, x86 / IA-32, x86-64, and MIPS |
| Type | Sound server |
| License | LGPL-2.1-or-later |
| Website | pulseaudio.org |
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.
PulseAudio is free and open-source software, and is licensed under the terms of the LGPL-2.1-or-later.
It was created in 2004 under the name Polypaudio but was renamed in 2006 to PulseAudio.
PulseAudio competes with newer PipeWire, which provides a compatible PulseAudio server (known as pipewire-pulse), and PipeWire is now used by default on many Linux distributions, including Fedora Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian.