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.

Tasks

1. Remove esd server,keep libesd. See: list of direct users of esd

2. 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)

1. Postulate PulseAudio as the default sound server to the distributors for 2.18, esound as dead

libcanberra can already replace Libgnome{,ui}, with more features.

libgnome 94615 libgnomeui 82340