Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/oh-nine-sixteen.html
#nocomments y
As a followup to Oh Nine
Fifteen here’s a little overview of the changes coming with PulseAudio 0.9.16 which will be part of
Fedora 12 (already in Rawhide; I think Ubuntu Karmic (?) will have it
too).
A New Mixer Logic
We now try to control more than just a single ALSA mixer element for volume
control. This increases the hardware volume range and granularity exposed and
should also help minimizing problems by incomplete or incorrect default mixer
initialization on the lower levels.
This also adds support for allowing selection of input/output ports for
sound cards. This is used to expose changing between Mic vs. Line-In for input
source selection and Headphones vs. Speaker for output selection (of course the
list of available port is strictly dependant on what you hardware supports).
The list of available ports is deliberately kept minimal.
Thanks to Bastien the newest GNOME Volume Control now exposes profile/port
switching quite nicely, which he
blogged about. This
screenshot shows how the port (here called ‘Connector’) can be selected
in the new dialog.
The mixer rework also allows us to handle semi-pro/pro sound cards a bit
more flexibly. For example, which profiles/ports are exposed in PulseAudio or
how specific mixer elements are handled can now be controlled by editing .ini
file like configuration files in /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/.
Read
this mail for more information about this.
UPnP MediaServer Support
PulseAudio now integrates with Zeeshan’s fabulous Rygel UPnP/DLNA MediaServer. If enabled
Rygel will automatically expose all local audio devices which are managed by
PulseAudio as UPnP/DLNA MediaServer items which your UPnP/DLNA MediaRenderers
can now tune into. (Meaning: you can now stream audio from your PC directly to
your UPnP DMP (Digital Media Player) device, such as the PS3.) Communication
between Rygel and PulseAudio follows our little Media Server Spec on the
GNOME Wiki. This nicely complements the RAOP (Apple Airport) support we
introduced in PulseAudio 0.9.15. In one of the next versions of
PulseAudio/Rygel we hope to add support for PulseAudio becoming a MediaRenderer
as well. This will then not only allow you to stream from your PC to your
DMP device, but also allows PulseAudio to act as
“networked speaker”, which can be used by any UPnP/AV/DLNA control point, such
as Windows’ Media Player.
Hotplug Support Improved
If you select a particular device as the default for a specific application
or class of streams, then when unplugging the device PulseAudio moves the stream
automatically to another audio device if one exists. New in PulseAudio 0.9.16
is that if you replug the audio device the stream will instantly be moved back,
requiring no further user intervention.
Also, PulseAudio now includes some implicit rules for doing the ‘right
thing’ when finding an audio device for an application. For example, unless
configured otherwise it will now route telephony applications automatically to
Bluetooth headsets if one is connected, in favour of the internal sound card of
the computer.
Surround Sound Support for Event Sounds
This is more a new feature of libcanberra than
of PulseAudio, but nonetheless: we now support surround for events sounds.
This allows us to play full 5.1 login sounds for example, in best THX cinema
fashion. We’d love to ship a 5.1 sound for login by default in sound-theme-freedesktop.
We’d be very thankful if you would be willing to contribute a sound
here, or two! A sound a bit less bombastic than the famous cinema THX effect
would probably be a good idea though.
And then there’s of course the usual batch of fixes and small improvements.
A substantial number of non-user visible changes have been made as well. For
example, as HAL is now obsolete PulseAudio now moved to udev for its device
discovery needs. We replaced our gdbm support by support for tdb. Also,
we stripped all security senstive code from PulseAudio, and ported it to use
RealtimeKit instead.
For the upcoming distributions that means that PulseAudio will run as real-time
process by default, improving drop-out safety.
And for some extra PA eye-candy, have a look on Impulse!