Pulse Audio has received a significant update accompanying several enhancements, bug fixes, and other additions that are sure to improve the sounds of your system.
Before we delve into its latest version, it only makes sense to introduce PulseAudio to our readers who are unfamiliar with it. As you would have guessed by its name, PulseAudio deals with the system sounds and allows the user to manage them better.
Apart from that, the program also comes with some complex functionalities, like allowing the user to mix various sounds into one and transfer the audio to another speaker. You will find PulseAudio in most of the Linux distributions out there and mobile devices as well. Now that we’re done with its introduction let’s see what the new PulseAudio 13.0 has in store for us.
What’s New
Because the last update to PulseAudio was released back in July 2018, the developers got enough time to integrate as many changes as possible into this update. The key highlight of Pulse Audio 13.0 is that it supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, which had been lacking in its previous versions. However, if you think that that’s big, wait till you get to hear about all the other changes.
This update also allows PulseAudio to better select initial card profile for ALSA cards and let client threads perform scheduling in realtime. With this, PulseAudio wouldn’t pick a profile whose output doesn’t work. This implies application developers wouldn’t have to look for the APIs of their system themselves, respectively. Other than that, the software can now support the SteelSeries Arctis 5 USB headset, which is good news for anyone who owns the device.
There have also been additions of new modules, which include “stream_name” (module-rtp-send), “max_latency_msec” (module-loopback), and “avoid_resampling” (module-alsa-card and module-udev-detect).
With this update, some features have been removed from the software, such as BlueZ4 support and intltool. Last (but not the least), the developers have introduced the Meson Build system and removed several bugs.
Conclusion
With more than a year in the making, PulseAudio 13.0 makes up for the recent lack of updates with its added support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. With that being said, it is not the only thing that the new PulseAudio brings to the table as it comes with tons of other upgrades, which you can check out from its official release notes.
