Introduction to Linux sound system and PulseAudio

Introduction to Linux sound system and PulseAudio-Linux general technology-Linux technology and application information. The following is a detailed description. Linux sound systems may be the most unordered sub-systems! As a Server, the voice is insignificant and nobody cares about it. As a desktop, there are too many implementation solutions, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages. After years of development, ALSA, basically unified the Linux sound card hardware driver layer excuse, the OSS is getting out, but on the application layer of ALSA, the number of solutions and software is staggering! ESD, aRts, JACK, and GStreamer. Each of these system components is a battle and different functions are implemented. ESD is the GNOME sound server, while aRts is a KDE, JACK can process some underlying applications. GStreamer is the intermediate layer of the new Code and Decode on the GNOME platform. It delivers decoded RAW Audio to the sound server, and there are many programs, such as Xine and Mplayer, their voice processing is completely done by themselves. From CODEC to the output to the ALSA driver, all applications are arranged and no other intermediate layers are needed! This makes the entire sound system extremely complex and messy! The PulseAudio sound server tries to provide a new sound processing architecture with a new architecture, hoping to unify the sound application field like the unified underlying layer of ALSA!

For most GNOME programs today, the sound processing process is as follows:
The application calls GSTreamer decoding to decompress the compressed audio file into raw audio data, and then hand it to the ESD sound server. The ESD is transferred to ALSA to the device layer to complete sound output, if you use PulseAudio, you only need to replace ESD with PulseAudio! For other applications, there are more than these problems!

The goal of PulseAudio is to reduce the overall complexity of the sound system and facilitate the development of various sound applications. The most convenient way to install PulseAudio is to install the compiled package directly from the release! The latest Fedora 8 is already the release of PulseAudio Ready!

List of Pulse packages installed on my system
Pulseaudio-core-libs-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8
Alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.14-5.fc8
Pulseaudio-module-x11-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8
Pulseaudio-module-gconf-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8
Gstreamer-plugins-pulse-0.9.5-0.4.svn20070924.fc8
Pulseaudio-libs-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8
Pulseaudio-libs-glib2-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8
Pulseaudio-utils-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8
Pulseaudio-esound-compat-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8
Pulseaudio-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8

Thanks to the excellent replacement of pulseaudio-esound-compat, most ESD-based applications use PulseAudio.

About 90% of applications can use PulseAudio, and KDE can set aRTs to route directly to ESD, while XMMS and Amarok can set the background sound server to ESD.

PulseAudio is also capable of processing requests over the network and can process the original sound from multiple data sources, which is one of the other major features.