PulseAudio
More info
- Creator
- Lennart Poettering, Pierre Ossman
- Released
- 2004
- Type
- Sound server
- License
- LGPL
- Predecessor
- ESD
- Successor
- PipeWire
The sound server that gave the Linux desktop per-application volume and audio that follows you to your headphones — after first giving it a couple of years of crackle.
Lennart Poettering started the project in 2004 as Polypaudio and renamed it in 2006. The aim was to replace ESD and aRts with a server that could mix, move live streams between outputs, send audio over the network and handle Bluetooth headsets. Fedora made it the default in 2007, Ubuntu in 2008.
The rollout became a case study in how not to swap out infrastructure. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling exposed bugs in ALSA drivers nobody had noticed before, and all users saw was that sound stuttered after the upgrade. The reputation stuck long after the bugs were fixed. It nevertheless remained the desktop standard for fifteen years, until PipeWire took over its API.