%general-entities; ]> $Date$ PulseAudio-&pulseaudio-version; PulseAudio Introduction to PulseAudio PulseAudio is a sound system for POSIX OSes, meaning that it is a proxy for 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. &lfs101_checked; Package Information Download (HTTP): Download (FTP): Download MD5 sum: &pulseaudio-md5sum; Download size: &pulseaudio-size; Estimated disk space required: &pulseaudio-buildsize; Estimated build time: &pulseaudio-time; PulseAudio Dependencies Required Recommended , , , , , and Optional , , (for documentation), , , , , (Bluetooth support), , JACK, libasyncns, LIRC, ORC, soxr, TDB, and WebRTC AudioProcessing User Notes: Installation of PulseAudio If is not installed, workaround a building issue because of the changes in meson-0.57.2: sed '/doxygen/d' -i meson.build Install PulseAudio by running the following commands: mkdir build && cd build && meson --prefix=/usr \ --buildtype=release \ -Ddatabase=gdbm \ -Dbluez5=false && ninja To test the results, issue: ninja test. One test fails if the tests are not run as the root user, but this can be ignored. Now, as the root user: ninja install Running PulseAudio as a system-wide daemon is possible but not recommended. See for more information. While still as the root user, remove the D-Bus configuration file for the system wide daemon to avoid creating unnecessary system users and groups: rm -fv /etc/dbus-1/system.d/pulseaudio-system.conf Command Explanations -Dbluez5=false: This switch prevents a runtime error if and are both installed but is not installed. Remove this if you have installed all three packages. Configuring PulseAudio Config Files There are system wide configuration files: /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, /etc/pulse/client.conf, /etc/pulse/default.pa, and user configuration files with the same names in ~/.config/pulse. User configuration files take precedence over system wide ones. ~/.config/pulse /etc/pulse/daemon.conf /etc/pulse/client.conf /etc/pulse/default.pa Configuration Information You may have to configure the audio system. You can start pulseaudio in command line mode using pulseaudio -C and then list various information and change settings. See man pulse-cli-syntax. If pulseaudio was working but you no-longer have sound, after checking for hardware issues (speakers or headphones not connected, external amplifier not connected) you may need to fix it. One suggestion is to close the application, such as firefox where sound has stopped working, then run: pactl list short sinks followed by: pacmd set-default-sink <sink #> and then restart the application. If that does not work, a more drastic approach often works. After closing the application, close pulseaudio, either using pulseaudio --kill or, if that fails, killall -KILL pulseaudio and then rm -rf ~/.config/pulse/* (and perhaps also rm -rf ~/.pulse/* if you have used a very old version of pulse on this machine), then run pulseaudio --verbose to restart it. If the daemon starts, restart the application. See man pulseaudio for more options. Contents Installed Programs Installed Libraries Installed Directories pacat, pacmd, pactl, padsp, pamon (symlink to pacat), paplay (symlink to pacat), parec (symlink to pacat), parecord (symlink to pacat), qpaeq, pasuspender, pax11publish, pulseaudio, and start-pulseaudio-x11 libpulse.so, libpulse-mainloop-glib.so, libpulse-simple.so, libpulsecommon-&pulseaudio-major-version;.so, libpulsecore-&pulseaudio-major-version;.so, and libpulsedsp.so /etc/pulse, /usr/include/pulse, /usr/lib/cmake/PulseAudio, /usr/lib/{pulseaudio,pulse-&pulseaudio-major-version;}, /usr/libexec/pulse, and /usr/share/pulseaudio Short Descriptions pacat plays back or records raw or encoded audio streams on a PulseAudio sound server pacat pacmd is a tool used to reconfigure a PulseAudio sound server during runtime pacmd pactl is used to control a running PulseAudio sound server pactl padsp is the PulseAudio OSS Wrapper padsp pamon is a symbolic link to pacat pamon paplay is used to play audio files on a PulseAudio sound server paplay parec is a symbolic link to pacat parec parecord is a symbolic link to pacat parecord pasuspender is a tool that can be used to tell a local PulseAudio sound server to temporarily suspend access to the audio devices, to allow other applications to access them directly pasuspender pax11publish is the PulseAudio X11 Credential Utility pax11publish pa-info is a shell script that prints various information relating to the Pulseaudio server currently in use pa-info pulseaudio is a networked low-latency sound server for Linux pulseaudio qpaeq is an equalizer interface for PulseAudio equalizer sinks (Requires at build time) qpaeq start-pulseaudio-x11 starts PulseAudio and registers it to the X11 session manager start-pulseaudio-x11