In the past week the release of the new version of the PulseAudio 13.0 sound server was announced, that acts as an intermediary between the applications and various low-level sound subsystems, abstracting the work with the team.
PulseAudio lets you control volume and sound mixing at the individual application levels, organize the input, mix and output of sound in the presence of multiple input and output channels or sound cards, in addition to allowing you to change the audio transmission format on the fly and use plugins, it makes it possible to transparently redirect the transmission of audio to another machine.
It is compatible with Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD, macOS and Windows. The PulseAudio code is distributed under the LGPL 2.1+ license.
Main new features of PulseAudio 13.0
In this new installment of PulseAudio 13.0 the developers stood out in the announcement adding the ability to play encoded audio streams Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio codecs.
As well as the support for SteelSeries Arctis 5 headphones They connect via USB. The Arctis series is notable in that it uses separate output devices with separate volume control for voice (mono) and other sounds (stereo).
On the other hand also highlighted the work on the "max_latency_msec" configuration a module-loopback, which can be used to set the upper limit of delays.
By default, the delay increases automatically if the data does not have time to arrive, and the proposed settings can be useful if keeping delays within certain limits is more important than interruptions in playback.
Added the "stream_name" parameter to the module-rtp-send to determine the symbolic name of the stream being created instead of "PulseAudio RTP Stream at address".
S / PDIF has been set for CMEDIA High-Speed True HD sound cards with USB 2.0 interface, in which unusual device indexes not working in default settings in ALSA are used for S / PDIF.
Regarding the bugs fixed in this new version, the developers resolved the issues with choosing profiles for ALSA-compatible sound cards.
When launching PulseAudio the alsa module sometimes marked inaccessible profiles as available, leading to the choice of a card profile with inactive output.
In particular, previously a profile was considered accessible if it contained a receiver and a source, and at least one of them was available. Now these profiles will be recognized as unavailable.
Also the selected profiles of sound cards that work via Bluetooth stopped saving.
By default, the A2DP profile is now always used, not the profile previously selected by the user as the use of the Bluetooth card profiles is highly context dependent (HSP / HFP for phone calls and A2DP for everything else).
To restore the previous behavior of the module-card-restore module, the "restore_bluetooth_profile = true" setting is implemented.
Of the other changes that are highlighted in the announcement, we find the following:
- Module-loopback uses source-specific discretization parameters by default
- The "avoid_resampling" parameter has been added to module-udev-detect and module-alsa-card to exclude the possibility of converting the format and sample rate, for example when it is necessary to selectively prohibit changing the card sample rate main sound, but allow an additional
- Support for BlueZ 4 branch, which has not been followed since 2012, was removed after the advent of BlueZ 5.0
- Intltool support removed, the need for which disappeared after transition to new version of gettext
- The transition to using the Meson build system instead of the automated tools is planned. We are currently testing the build process using Meson.
Finally alone it remains to wait for the package to be included in the Ubuntu repositories or you can also get this new version from the following link, downloading it and compiling it on your system.