One of the great new features in Fedora 8 is the inclusion of the PulseAudio sound server. PulseAudio allows multiple streams of audio to be played at once, eliminating the worry of having your sound card locked up by another running program. There's also a handy volume control applet that will let you set the volume of each audio stream independently. That's right folks, listen to your MP3s, watch (and listen!) to a YouTube video, and voice chat with your IM buddies, all at the same time and with independent control over each program's volume. Setting up PulseAudio is very easy. Read on for instructions.

One PulseAudio bug I had in Ubuntu 9.10 and now 10.04 is that below a certain volume level, I get no sound at all. Once I raise the volume past that level sound works but the lowest volume is louder than I sometimes want. Fortunately there's a workaround available in PulseAudio for this bug.

PulseAudio is a Linux sound server that, through abstraction layers, promises a myriad of flexible audio features: combining multiple sound cards into a single, multi-channel device, changing output devices on the fly for running applications, even redirecting input and output between machines over the network.

PulseAudio is a next generation sound server for Linux, making all sorts of "ear-candy" possible: from dynamically changing the volume of individual applications to hot-plugging support for many different devices.

There are a lot of great sound-related applications for Linux, from basic audio drivers and sound servers to sophisticated mixers, editors, and special effects engines. Which is not much consolation for the user who just wants sound to work on her system, and these days everything old is new again--once again, getting sound to work correctly, or at all, is almost as fun as in the olden days.

The sound scheme in Jaunty has some important changes that you need to be aware of. Alsa 1.0.18 and Pulseaudio 0.9.14 are implemented in Jaunty. The new ALSA provides more support and greater functionality for more sound devices than previous versions. Pulseaudio 0.9.14 does some of the same on the sound server side.

Mandriva has announced that future releases of Mandriva Linux will use PulseAudio as the default sound server for all desktops.

I've got a small problem with wine and pulseaudio, ok, so thing is, I have an error when I launch wine, but I have sound. For some apps, the sound is good, for another one it's cracking.if I install lib32asound2-plugins to solve the error message, then I have cracking sound then no sound at all

By default, PulseAudio in Ubuntu up to Jaunty is set to work with 2 speakers (front channels). This tutorial will explain how to enable multiple sound channels (5.1, 7.1, etc) in Pulseaudio.