Lennart Poettering checks in from this year's Linux Plumbers Conference to detail the latest PulseAudio developments.

After having run into several somewhat small but bothersome problems with both my machines running Fedora 10 (various sound problems with the new pulse, a new slew of compiz problems, and bad Xorg memory leaks), I decided that since OpenSuSE offers many things I was looking for right now: RPM 4.6, OpenOffice.org 3, a decent pulseaudio that hasn’t implemented timer based scheduling, etc, that I w

One of the great new features in Fedora 8 is the inclusion of the PulseAudio sound server. PulseAudio allows multiple streams of audio to be played at once, eliminating the worry of having your sound card locked up by another running program. There's also a handy volume control applet that will let you set the volume of each audio stream independently. That's right folks, listen to your MP3s, watch (and listen!) to a YouTube video, and voice chat with your IM buddies, all at the same time and with independent control over each program's volume. Setting up PulseAudio is very easy. Read on for instructions.

Some time ago, Mandriva decided to install the PulseAudio sound server by default in its distribution. Personally I did not really like the decision to activate PulseAudio by default in all desktop environments: I have been using Alsa with great satisfaction now for years, and I did not have any problem with that, so having to depend on yet another service did seem overkill to me. Nevertheless, I let PulseAudio be activated on my system too, in order to help as much as possible with bug hunting.

PulseAudio is the new sound server that’s being included in Ubuntu 8.04 and other recent Linux distros. A sound server lets changes be made to sound between the applications and sound hardware layers. Among other features, PulseAudio provides per-application volume controls, a plugin architecture, low-latency, networking features, and good application compatibility.

By default, PulseAudio in Ubuntu up to Jaunty is set to work with 2 speakers (front channels). This tutorial will explain how to enable multiple sound channels (5.1, 7.1, etc) in Pulseaudio.

One PulseAudio bug I had in Ubuntu 9.10 and now 10.04 is that below a certain volume level, I get no sound at all. Once I raise the volume past that level sound works but the lowest volume is louder than I sometimes want. Fortunately there's a workaround available in PulseAudio for this bug.

Where would we be without sound? When Fedora 11 lands, along with it will land a number of enhancements to the sound subsystem. I recently caught up with Lennart Poettering. Here's what he had to say about the upcoming improvements and what the future holds...

I couldn't get PulseAudio to work on one of my computers no matter what I do. But removing PulseAudio can be tricky and besides, there is a very easy way to "fix" it (if you're using GStreamer as a backend for music and videos). This is very useful for applications which use GStreamer but do not let you select the sound output module like: Rhythmbox, Totem and so on.