PulseAudio, previously known as Polypaudio, is a sound server for POSIX and Win32 systems. A sound server is basically a proxy for your sound applications. It allows you to do advanced operations on your sound data as it passes between your application and your hardware. Things like transferring the audio to a different machine, changing the sample format or channel count and mixing several sounds into one are easily achieved using a sound server.
PulseAudio has been tested on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It should also run on all other POSIX and Windows systems, but may require new backends to handle their sound systems.
PulseAudio & GNOME
There has been some discussions to make PulseAudio the dropin replacement of Esound. You can also see the Audio BOF of the GUADEC2006/Slides, and read thePulseAudio website FAQ.
Tasks
Introduce PulseAudio in jhbuild (and other compilations chains): See gnomebug:348572
Introduce experimental .deb, .rpm, ... (in testing/unstable). PulseAudio is also the default sound daemon in Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 8.04.
Remove esd server,keep libesd. See: list of direct users of esd
Start a gnome goal "drop progressively the dependency of libesd everywhere", thus we could compile with or without it. (it doesn't mean we have to replace to offer the same functionnality. But starting to make it optionnal, and use only libgnome, where appropriate). If necessary, use libpulseaudio instead. (saying that it's not perfect, GStreamer support is better)
Module |
Status |
Desktop |
|
ekiga |
|
gnome-control-center |
|
gnome-games/gnometris |
|
gnome-media/vu-meter |
|
gnome-session |
gnomebug:398430 |
gok |
|
libgnome |
|
libgnomeui |
|
mozilla/widget/src/gtk |
outside GNOME ? |
nautilus |
|
Postulate PulseAudio as the default sound server to the distributors for 2.18, esound as dead
Regarding libgnome{,ui}, there is two quite old bug reports, but they do not really fix the pb of the broken api design and do not take into account theming/and extra features... We should wait the result of the discussions during FOMS/DAM3 to decide how/which the desktop sound API will be provided. One proposal can be foud here. Lennart & Mikko have some ideas that they will share soon.
The previous goal is only about droping mandatory hard dependency on esd.
libgnome gnomebug:94615 libgnomeui gnomebug:82340
