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.

Some time ago, Mandriva decided to install the PulseAudio sound server by default in its distribution. Personally I did not really like the decision to activate PulseAudio by default in all desktop environments: I have been using Alsa with great satisfaction now for years, and I did not have any problem with that, so having to depend on yet another service did seem overkill to me. Nevertheless, I let PulseAudio be activated on my system too, in order to help as much as possible with bug hunting.

One thing became very clear to me during my trip to the Linux Audio Conference 2010 in Utrecht: even many pro audio folks are not sure what Jack does that PulseAudio doesn't do and what PulseAudio does that Jack doesn't do.

The Developers and MOTUs for Ubuntu have seen fit to add PulseAudio to the audio stack. And I do mean add it to the stack. It sits on top of Alsa and attempts to manage the way people use their audio. And yes, it sits on top of Alsa, not replaces it.

PulseAudio is a cross-platform, open source sound server that supports advanced software mixing capabilities and network transparency. PulseAudio is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the Esound daemon and uses a pluggable Esound module for backwards compatibility.

I couldn't get PulseAudio to work on one of my computers no matter what I do. But removing PulseAudio can be tricky and besides, there is a very easy way to "fix" it (if you're using GStreamer as a backend for music and videos). This is very useful for applications which use GStreamer but do not let you select the sound output module like: Rhythmbox, Totem and so on.

The new version of PulseAudio has some pretty neat new features built in, one of the greatest features is support for Apple AirTunes, which is a protocol that allows you to stream audio to remote devices over a network. Using Pulseaudio server i was able to stream music wirelessly to my laptop from my Desktop.

By doing this procedure you will get the following: Fully functional audio in all applications, including those currently incompatible with PulseAudio (e.g. Audacity, Blender, Skype, Second Life + voice chat, Flash)

PulseAudio was supposed to cure desktop audio in Linux. But for many Ubuntu users it has been a vexation. Carla Schroder shows us how to turn it on and off so that it runs when we want it to, not when it wants to.