PulseAudio 2.0: Twice The Goodness!

That’s right, it’s finally out! Thanks go out to all our contributors for the great work (there’s too many — see the shortlog!). The highlights of the release follow. Head over to the announcement or release notes for more details.

  • Dynamic sample rate switching by Pierre-Louis Bossart: This makes PulseAudio even more power efficient.

  • Jack detection by David Henningsson: Separate volumes for your laptop speakers and headphones, and more stuff coming soon.

  • Major echo canceller improvements by me: Based on the WebRTC.org audio processing library, we now do better echo cancellation, remove the need to fiddle with the mic volume knob and have fixed AEC between laptop speakers and a USB webcam mic.

  • A virtual surround module by Niels Ole Salscheider: Try it out for some virtual surround sound shininess!

  • Support for Xen guests by Giorgos Boutsiouki: Should make audio virtualisation in guests more efficient.

We don't always make a release, but when we do, it's awesome

Special thanks from me to Collabora for giving me some time for upstream work.

Packages are available on Gentoo, Arch, and probably soon on other distributions if they’re not already there.

14 Comments

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  1. Is possible to unmute microphone without use alsamixer and use pulseaudio like a guitar amplifier?

    • Sorry, I don’t understand — what precisely are you trying to do?

      • Connecting the guitar jack cable to the microphone input (or line in) and listen it by the speakers or headphone. Right now I need to open a terminal write alsamixer and unmute the microphone because I didn’t find enything related in pavucontrol or in any GUI.

  2. What kernel config options are required to make use of Jack detection?

  3. About the jack detection, could it be possible in the future to use laptop speackers instead of headphones even when jack is connected or is this limited by the hardware? I guess using both at the same time is completely out of the question.

    • It depends very much on your hardware. I’d eventually like to see ALSA hand over this functionality to userspace and then have PulseAudio enable/disable outputs as per policy. This would allow you to do what you want if your hardware supports it.

  4. This does not seem to be mentioned anywhere but did the API/ABI change for clients? Or will older clients (that use PA directly) just work without a need for patiching / recompile?

    • We are pretty careful to make sure API/ABI is no broken. Clients should just work without modification with newer versions.

      At some point we might break API in order to improve things, but this will be announced very loudly and clearly. :)

  5. I wish this was in Fedora 17, but given that it is released in 10 days, I doubt that will be the case :(

  6. $ pulseaudio –version pulseaudio 2.0.0-1.mga2

    Running fine on Mageia 2 RC, thanks for all the work! :)

  7. My current pulseaudio setup routes my sflphone ring sound to the headset instead of my speakers (even if I change the output while its ringing). I only care about pulseaudio 2.0 if this is fixed.

  8. Hi Arun We are a startup based in Mumbai and are interested in working with you to do the a2dp bluetooth sink profile on a google nexus using custom rom or any other technique. Please let us know if you are interested in this opportunity and we can talk further. We look forward to hearing from you. Karthik K

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