PulseAudio
Sound server for Unix-like operating systems / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about PulseAudio?
Summarize this article for a 10 years old
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware inbetween applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.[5]
 | |
 Screenshot | |
| Developer(s) |
|
|---|---|
| Initial release | 17 July 2004; 18 years ago (2004-07-17)[1] |
| Stable release | |
| Repository | gitlab |
| Written in | C[3] |
| Operating system | FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Illumos, Solaris, macOS, and Microsoft Windows (not maintained) |
| Platform | ARM, PowerPC, x86 / IA-32, x86-64, and MIPS |
| Type | Sound server |
| License | LGPL-2.1-or-later[4] |
| Website | pulseaudio.org |
PulseAudio is free and open-source software, and is licensed under the terms of the LGPL-2.1-or-later.[4]
It was created in 2004 under the name Polypaudio but was renamed in 2006 to PulseAudio.[6]
PulseAudio has since been succeeded by PipeWire, which provides a compatible PulseAudio server (known as pipewire-pulse), and PipeWire is now used by default on many Linux distributions, including Fedora Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian.[7][8][9]