Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/polypaudio-0.9.0.html

We are proud to announce Polypaudio
0.9.0. This is a major step ahead since we decided to freeze the
current API. From now on we will maintain API compability (or at least
try to). To emphasize this starting with this release the shared
library sonames are properly versioned. While Polypaudio 0.9.0 is not
API/ABI compatible with 0.8 it is protocol compatible.

Other notable changes beyond bug fixing, bug fixing and bug fixing
are: a new Open Sound System /dev/dsp wrapper named
padsp and a module module-volume-restore have been
added.

padsp works more or less like that ESOUND tool known as
esddsp. However, it is much cleaner in design and thus works
with many more applications than the original tool. Proper locking is
implemented which allows it to work in multithreaded applications. In
addition to mere /dev/dsp emulation it wraps
/dev/sndstat and /dev/mixer. Proper synchronization
primitives are also available, which enables lip-sync movie playback
using padsp on mplayer. Other applications that are
known to work properly with padsp are aumix,
libao, XMMS, sox. There are some things
padsp doesn’t support (yet): that’s most notably recording,
and mmap() wrapping. Recording will be added in a later
version. mmap() support is available in esddsp but
not in padsp. I am reluctant to add support for this, because
it cannot work properly when it comes to playback latency
handling. However, latency handling this the primary reasoning for
using mmap(). In addition the hack that is included in
esddsp works only for Quake2 and Quake3, both being Free
Software now. It probably makes more sense to fix those two games than
implementing a really dirty hack in padsp. Remember that you
can always use the original esddsp tools since Polypaudio
offers full protocol compatibility with ESOUND.

module-volume-restore is a small module that stores the
volume of all playback streams and restores them when the applications
which created them creates a new stream. If this module is loaded,
Polypaudio will make sure that you Gaim sounds are always played at
low volume, while your XMMS music is always played at full volume.

Besides the new release of Polypaudio itself we released a bunch of
other packages to work with the new release:

• gst-polyp
  0.9.0, a Polypaudio plugin for GStreamer 0.10. The
  plugin is quite sophisticated. In fact it is probably the only
  sink/source plugin for GStreamer that reaches the functionality of the
  ALSA plugin that is shipped with upstream. It implements the
  GstPropertyProbe and GstImplementsInterface
  interfaces, which allow gnome-volume-meter and other
  GStreamer tools to control the volume of a Polypaudio server. The sink
  element listens for GST_EVENT_TAG events, and can thus use
  ID3 tags and other meta data to name the playback stream in the
  Polypaudio server. This is useful to identify the stream in the Polypaudio
  Volume Control. In short: Polypaudio 0.9.0 now offers first class
  integration into GStreamer.
• libao-polyp
  0.9.0, a simple plugin for libao, which is used for audio playback by tools like ogg123 and Gaim, besides others.
• xmms-polyp
  0.9.0, an output plugin for XMMS. As special feature it uses the
  currently played song name for naming the audio stream in
  Polypaudio.
• Polypaudio Manager 0.9.0, updated for Polypaudio 0.9.0
• Polypaudio Volume Control 0.9.0, updated for Polypaudio 0.9.0
• Polypaudio Volume Meter 0.9.0, updated for Polypaudio 0.9.0

A screenshot showing most of this in action:

.

This screenshot shows: the Polypaudio Manager, the Polypaudio
Volume Control, the Polypaudio Volume Meter, the XMMS plugin, the
GStreamer plugin used by Rhythmbox and gstreamer-properties,
pacat playing some noise from /dev/urandom,
padsp used on MPlayer. (This screenshot actually shows some
post-0.9.0 work, like the icons used by the application windows)