The Perfect Setup

This text tries to explain what steps are necessary to get the "perfect" PulseAudio setup on your system. Following these rules should enable the user to run 90% of all Linux/Unix applications on top of PulseAudio.

Distributors: if you ship PulseAudio, please make sure to follow these instruction as much as possible, to provide optimal PulseAudio experience to your users! Thank you!

Install All Utilities

Make sure to install all auxiliary GUI tools for the PulseAudio sound server:

• PulseAudio Volume Control
• PulseAudio Volume Meter
• PulseAudio Manager
• PulseAudio Device Chooser
• PulseAudio Preferences

PulseAudio Device Chooser

The Device Chooser will discover other sound servers running on the LAN by using Zeroconf/Avahi technolgy. Therefore make sure to compile PulseAudio with Avahi support and load the Zeroconf module on all machines on the LAN. In addition make sure to load the module-native-protocol-tcp and module-esound-protocol-tcp modules to allow remote access to the sound servers. Consider managing access to these servers with an IP ACL. This can look like this in your /etc/pulse/default.pa or ~/.pulse/default.pa startup script for PulseAudio:

load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;192.168.0.0/16
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;192.168.0.0/16
load-module module-zeroconf-publish

These three modules are not loaded in the default configuration because they might open PulseAudio for remote attackers.

Third Party Applications

ALSA Applications

If the PulseAudio plugin for alsalibs is installed all applications with support for the ALSA API should be able to access a PulseAudio server. You need version 1.0.12 or newer of the ALSA packages for the PulseAudio plugin to be included.

To activate the driver edit /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc and add:

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}

Now you you can access the PulseAudio server under the virtual ALSA device pulse:

% aplay -Dpulse foo.wav
% amixer -Dpulse

If you want to make the PulseAudio driver the default, use something like this in the ALSA configuration files:

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

If you select the default ALSA device to be "pulse", you need to make sure that PA doesn't try to open the "default" device for its own audio output. If you previously were loading module-alsa-sink without special device argument this means you have to change it to the raw "hw:0" devices. Example:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0

If you use HAL this is not necessary, because the raw ALSA device strings are used anyway.

The PulseAudio plugin for ALSA supports audio playback, audio capturing and supports the mixer.

Amarok

Amarok is a KDE media player. It supports multiple "engines", which can be changed within the menu: "Settings -> Configure Amarok... -> Engines". The GStreamer engine supports PulseAudio (refer to the general GStreamer section on this page for more information), while the Xine engine supports both PulseAudio (1.1.2 and newer) and Esound (older versions).

Audacious

As of version 1.2.0, Audacious supports PulseAudio natively. Simply Select "Preferences -> Audio -> Audio System -> PulseAudio Output Plugin". Also, for avoiding stuttering while playing mp3 files, the "Buffer Size" should be lowered to 300 ms. Audacious is a fork of beep-media-player 0.9.7.1.

Audacity

Audacity doesn't support PulseAudio, nor Esound for the moment. You'll have to kill pulseaudio before you use this application. However, some work has started on the PortAudio cross-platform Audio API, to support PulseAudio

ESOUND Applications

Make sure to load the module-protocol-esound-unix PulseAudio module for optimal support for ESOUND clients. Since this is the default you shouldn't need to change anything.

Some problems with ESOUND clients could be solved adding to your .bashrc

if [ ! -e /tmp/.esd-${UID} ]; then
        ln -s /tmp/.esd /tmp/.esd-${UID}
fi

Flash Player 7

You can make Flash Player 7 work with the Esound compatibility mode. However, there is a trick. It will only activate Esound if there are both /lib/libesd.so and /tmp/.esd/socket files present on your system.

The first one is easy to deal with. As root, type:

# ln -sf /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /lib/libesd.so

For the second file, it is created if you use PulseAudio with the Esound module. If you're running in a thin-client model, you'll need to manually create a file:

mkdir -p /tmp/.esd
chmod 1777 /tmp/.esd
touch /tmp/.esd/socket
chmod 777 /tmp/.esd/socket

Flash Player 9

An experimental libflashsupport.so module provides Pulseaudio support for Flash Player 9. Go to http://pulseaudio.revolutionlinux.com/ for more information. Go here for a straight-forward, simple guide.

Update: there's now a newer implementation of libflashsupport.so available from the PulseAudio developers: gitweb, git-clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/libflashsupport.git/. Please make sure to use this version for better results.

3/08 more update on fedora 8 with flash v115 their is no need for the previous update (it breaks sound with error : "unable to connect: connection refused") it works out of the box

16/04/08 Good news for all those experiencing crashes with flash9 + libflashsupport. It looks like new beta version of flashplayer can use pcm_pulse plugin without additional libraries. Here is nice summary for Ubuntu.

GNOME

Current GNOME versions have support for starting ESD on session startup. Because PulseAudio can be used as drop-in replacement for ESD you can fool GNOME to load the PulseAudio daemon just like the traditional ESD daemon. To achieve this use the esdcompat script shipped with PulseAudio. Create a symlink from /usr/bin/esd to this script:

$ ln -sf /usr/local/bin/esdcompat /usr/bin/esd

(Make sure to fix the path passed to ln)

That's it. Now GNOME should load and make use of PulseAudio automatically on each login. (unless of course you disabled the option "Enable software sound mixing (ESD)" in GNOME's Sound Preferences.

Make sure to follow instructions for GStreamer and ESOUND applications to get perfect user experience on GNOME.

GStreamer Applications

Applications using the modern GStreamer media framework such as Rhythmbox or Totem can make use of the PulseAudio through gst-pulse, our PulseAudio plugin for GStreamer. After installing it, you have to enable it as default audio sink and source for all GNOME applications by changing the GConf keys /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosink and /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosrc:

gconftool -t string --set /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosink pulsesink
gconftool -t string --set /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosrc pulsesrc

Alternatively, you can make these changes with the GUI tool gstreamer-properties.

The GStreamer plugin wraps playback, recording and the mixer interface.

iaxComm

iaxComm is an Open Source softphone for the Asterisk PBX. It doesn't support PulseAudio or Esound, so you'll have to kill pulseaudio before using this application. However, some work has started on the PortAudio cross-platform Audio API, to support PulseAudio

KDE

KDE 3 uses the artsd sound server by default. However, artsd itself can be configured to use an Esound backend. Edit kcmartsrc (either in /etc/kde or /usr/share/config for global configuration or .kde/share/config to configure only one user) like this:

[Arts]
Arguments=\s-F 10 -S 4096 -a esd -n -s 1 -m artsmessage -c drkonqi -l 3 -f
NetworkTransparent=true
SuspendTime=1

KDE 4 uses Phonon as the main audio interface. The Xine backend of Phonon should eventually use PulseAudio automatically, but at the time of writing the pulse plugin for Xine is too unreliable, so it's disabled by default. While waiting for that to get better, Phonon uses Alsa. Therefore, to get Phonon to use PulseAudio, you have to edit your ~/.asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf. However, the normal .asoundrc modifications aren't enough. See #232 (specifically the workaround part).

libao Applications

By installing the PulseAudio plugin for libao you can get transparent PulseAudio support in all applications making use of that library. That includes mpg123, ogg123, and GAIM (Pidgin uses GStreamer since 2.0.0)

Download libao-pulse, install it and than edit /etc/libao.conf:

default_driver=pulse

That's it.

MPD

MPD is the Music Player Daemon. Check out a revision later than 4316 from SVN and compile as usual. Be sure to check that PulseAudio support is enabled in the configure output. Then simply add a PulseAudio output to your mpd.conf:

...
audio_output {
        type    "pulse"
        name    "My MPD PulseAudio Output"
        server  "localhost"   # optional
        sink    "alsa_output" # optional
}
...

See also the MPD wiki page on PulseAudio.

MPlayer

PulseAudio support is included in the current SVN version of MPlayer:

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

Make it the default by changing the line starting with ao= in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf:

...
ao=pulse
...

Alternatively you can pass the audio driver name on MPlayer's command line:

% mplayer -ao pulse movie.avi

MPlayer also works with the pulseaudio alsa plugin as configured above. To get volume control working, configure MPlayer to use alsa instead of oss in mplayer.conf:

mixer=hw:0

MPlayer plug-in

mplayerplug-in is a browser plugin that uses mplayer to play digital media from websites.

It is configured in the same manner as the regular mplayer, except that the configuration file is $HOME/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf. Also, you cannot pass the audio driver name from the command line, since the plugins calls mplayer directly from the browser.

MythTV

A patch has been sent to mythtv to allow myth's alsa output to be compatible with the pulse alsa plugin. The patch is located here.

After you've compiled Myth with this patch, configure alsa as described above. Then from mythfrontend, go to Utilities/Setup->Setup->General->Next->Next, and set Audio output device to 'ALSA:default' if you configured pulse to be the default output device, or 'ALSA:pulse', it pulse hasn't been configured to be the default. (Note, both are without the single quotes).

To get volume change support, change Mixer Device to be the same as what you used for Audio output device, and change Mixer Controls to 'Master'.

OpenAL Applications

Editing ~/.openalrc to look like following seems to work nice:

(define devices '(sdl))

-- I'm currently working on a native pulseaudio backend for openal-soft (which is an openal implementation)

http://www.lastlog.de/wiki/index.php/Pulseaudio

OSS Applications

To run applications that support the OSS API for audio playback (/dev/dsp) on top of PulseAudio you can use the tool padsp that is part of the PulseAudio distribution.

A few example:

% padsp aumix
% padsp sox foo.wav -t ossdsp /dev/dsp
% ...

padsp wraps audio playback and capturing (/dev/dsp), mixer controls (/dev/mixer) and sound status (/dev/sndstat).

Real Player 10

Real Player 10 cannot be used with either Esound (note) or PulseAudio at this time. However, you can either use Real Player 8, or use MPlayer with the RealPlayer codecs.

Real Player 8 / G2

Real Player 8 can be used with the Esound compatibility mode. To enable it, go to the application menu, select View/Preferences. Go to the Performance tab, and in the Audio Driver options, check "Esound Support". Alternatively, you can use this command:

echo "SoundDriver=2" > $HOME/.RealNetworks_RealMediaSDK_60

SDL

SDL supports multiple output options (alsa, oss, nas, esd, arts, etc). It doesn't (yet) support Pulse, but you can use the esd backend by adding this to your .profile or similar.

export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=esd

Note: on Debian/Ubuntu, you need the libsdl1.2debian-esd package, otherwise you only get alsa support.

You can also get sound using the alsa backend, and use the .asoundrc method described in the Alsa section to redirect sound from Alsa to Pulse.

Update: A native PA driver for SDL has recently been merged into SDL upstream.

Skype

Although Skype is an Alsa application, for some reason, it doesn't seem to like the "pulse" device. The work-around, is not to use the "default" sound device. Rather to use a specific hardware device, and use pasuspender to momentarily suspend pulseaudio. Here are the steps

Note: These steps were tested on Fedora8 with Skype ver 2.0 beta

• Launch Skype, right click on its tray icon, and click "options"
• Click "sound devices" category
• For the Sound out, Sound in, and Ringing devices, change the default device to the first plughw device (The exact name depends on your hardware)
• Click apply
• Click close
• Right click on Skype's tray icon, and click Quit
• Now launch skype whether from the run dialog or from a shell using the command "pasuspender skype". This momentarily suspends pulseaudio, and starts skype
• Enjoy :)
• Unfortunately: If you're running skype all the time (like me, from login to logout, if you want to be able to receive skype calls), the momentarily suspension of pulseaudio becomes indefinitely. So pulseaudio becomes useless.
• I found this additional info in the skype forums: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=112021&hl=pulseaudio : Andypoo, a Skype staff member, gives some info about the problem (his point of view is that it is pulseaudio's fault, not Skype). And someone found a solution to let pulseaudio and skype work together (by making PulseAudio support dmix): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4526841#post4526841 . But he notes this though: "PulseAudio's module-suspend-idle has a bug when you get PulseAudio to use dmix. Some assertion failure while starting up. If you don't kill PulseAudio once it has managed to start up though, it should be quite stable. But getting it to even start up is a hit or miss for me. The quick fix is of course to not load module-suspend-idle, but on my system, dmix begins crackling if it isn't released after a very long period of time."
• And on pulseaudio-discuss mailing-list I'm told "Pulse on DMIX is so ugly it makes babies cry" and "skype (a closed source product) does not work properly. We cannot fix skype, it's up to their devs to do it."
• Someone else in that skype forum thread: "Skype should not program anything specically targeted at DMIX. Skype should be programmed to interface with the ALSA API in a standard way. ... A solid ALSA implementation in Skype would address most issues for most users but a pluggable sound API for Skype would be best... ". Let's hope the Skype linux developer(s) reprogram Skype soon with this suggestion. (by vatbier)

If for some reason you want or need Skype to go through PulseAudio, there is a OSS version of Skype 1.4 (intended for Solaris and FreeBSD's Linux emulation) that can be downloaded from

http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/

from the link "Static-OSS". This version will route audio through PulseAudio when started as "padsp skype".

TiMidity++

TiMidity++ supports either libao or Esound. You can use switches to select the choosen audio output:

% timidity -Oe <file.mid> #Esound
% timidity -OO <file.mid> #libao

Totem

The Totem movie player can, depending on the version installed, use either GStreamer or Xine libraries for audio output.

For GStreamer, refer to the general configuration above. For the Xine backend, you configure it like the regular Xine (see below), except that the configuration file is $HOME/.gnome2/totem_config.

wavbreaker

The current development tree of wavbreaker has an output module that will be enabled at compile-time when the pulseaudio development libraries and headers are installed. The next release will include this module, so PulseAudio will be officially supported by wavbreaker.

Wine

The ALSA output in Wine (beta releases) does not work with the PulseAudio plugin for ALSA (called alsa-pulse) currently, at least not for DirectSound. See this bug report for Wine and this report for PulseAudio.
If it does not work to route the audio through ALSA, perhaps Wine will work better if it uses the OSS or ESD procol between Wine and PulseAudio.

Distributions like Ubuntu 8.04 is set up so that the default ALSA "device" is pulse, i.e. the PulseAudio plugin for ALSA. Furthermore PulseAudio will take control over the hardware to avoid the use of dmix (better latency, less compatible with things like Winealsa).

If a gamer wants lowest possible latency, and does not need any other app to play sound (like voice chats like "Teamspeak"), then they should use pasuspender. This makes PulseAudio release the hardware interface, so a game can use it exclusively, and without dmix or PulseAudio in between.

Winealsa is now ( some time before may 4. 2008) fixed, so it uses the alsa device "default" instead of "default:0" (or like numbers), and does not require a volume control called PCM but uses the default volume control.

Xine

The newest (1.1.3) Xine versions support PulseAudio. For 1.0-1.1.2, you will need to specify the "polypaudio" driver, while the oldest versions support Esound. Simply modify the audio.driver setting in $HOME/.xine/config:

...
audio.driver:pulse (or polypaudio or esd depending on xine version)
...

Note: for openSUSE 10.3 using xine from packman, I had to use 'pulseaudio' and not 'pulse' in order to get it working. I'm not sure if this is required for other distros.

XMMS

To use XMMS with PulseAudio as audio server install xmms-pulse. To activate it this output plugin, edit ~/.xmms/config and change the line starting with output_plugin=:

[xmms]
...
output_plugin=/usr/lib/xmms/Output/libxmms-pulse.so
...

Alternatively use the configuration dialog of XMMS (like most sane people would probably do...).

Zattoo

Zattoo is an ALSA application and should have worked using the above description, but it continues to produce short clicking sounds every 2 to 5 seconds. This is not a synchronization problem as the video playback does not show any conspicuity. Input on this problem is appreciated (edit this wiki entry if you have fought this problem successfully)!

RTCW / Enemy Territory / True Combat Elite / Quake 3

To use those games with PulseAudio as audio server, you will have to follow instructions from http://nullkey.ath.cx/~stuff/et-sdl-sound/. Padsp doesn't work with them... No need to try it.

*Warning* Be aware that redirecting library calls to this "wrapper" might be detected as an attempt to cheat. So far PunkBuster? doesn't complain about it but it might in the future. You have been warned!

Setting SDL_AUDIODRIVER="esd" in the wrapper is reported to work better than the default (alsa)