Few days ago the release of the new version was announced from the sound server Pulse Audio 15.0, which acts as an intermediary between the applications and various low-level sound subsystems, abstracting the work with the team.
PressAudio allows you to control the volume and sound mix at the level of individual applications, 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 streaming format on the fly and use plugins, it makes it possible to transparently redirect the audio stream to another machine.
Main news PulseAudio 15.0
In this new version of PulseAudio one of the most important novelties is with the compatibility with Bluetooth that has been extended significantly, since new A2DP LDAC and AptX codecs have been addedIn addition, "XQ" configuration variants are also available for the old SBC codecs.
It is mentioned that SBC XQ variants have a fixed bit rate (and higher than the "normal" SBC), so they can have more interruptions if the wireless connection is bad, but on the other hand the quality is always good if the connection is good. For variable bitrate, PulseAudio can now increase the bitrate again after it was lowered due to connectivity issues.
Another novelty That stands out are the new command line parametersas get-default- {sink | source}, get- {sink | source} -volumey get- {sink | source} -mute which added support for configuring sound card profiles and allows you to configure the module arguments module-alsa-card via udev configuration via a new udev variable called PULSE_MODARGS.
Also added support for AVRCP Absolute Volume to programmatically control the volume of connected A2DP devices, as previously, when gaming with a headset, PulseAudio made its own volume control in software and the headset made its own volume control in hardware. Having two volume levels sometimes made it difficult to get loud enough, now there is only one level of volume control.
Moreover on packers, PulseAudio now prevents loading of X11 modules in Wayland (the feature currently only works on GNOME), adds support for configuring OSS and Valgrind support in Meson, provides support for reading additional settings from /etc/pulse/default.pa.d/ to the startup script and a new option to build client libraries and utilities only.
Also the ability to pin sound card profiles was implemented, in which the status is not reset after removal and connection (for example, useful when reconnecting HDMI).
Of the other changes that stand out in the new version:
- The sink module has been completely rewritten with the implementation of a virtual surround sound effect (module-virtual-surround-sink).
- New mechanism for applications to disable shared memory on their connection to PulseAudio
- New "Message API" added to facilitate communication between clients and PulseAudio objects
- Alsa-mixer: disables Auto-Mute once the system has
- Support for the Autotools toolkit has been removed in favor of the Meson build system.
- Provided the ability to put ALSA path configuration files in the user's home directory ($ XDG_DATA_HOME / pulseaudio alsa-mixer / path), not just / usr / share / pulseaudio / alsa-mixer / paths.
- Improved hardware support
- The ALSA path configuration can reside in the user's home directory \
- Translation updates
- Improved Hardware Support: SteelSeries Arctis 9, HP Thunderbolt Dock 120W G2, Behringer U-Phoria UMC22, OnePlus Type-C Bullets, Sennheiser GSX 1000/1200 PRO.
- Improved FreeBSD support. Improved handling of hot plugging and unplugging of sound cards.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it About this new version of PulseAudio 15, you can check the details in the following link. Regarding the implementation of this new version has already begun to be distributed within the repositories of some Linux distributions so it only remains to wait for the package to be included in a general way in all distributions.