14 DAY TRIAL // Today, January 19, 2017, sees the official release of the PulseAudio 10.0 open-source sound server for Linux-based operating systems, a major version that introduces many exciting new features.
PulseAudio 10.0 has been in development for the past seven months, since June 22, 2016, when PulseAudio 9.0 was released, which is currently used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions.
The new release adds various interesting changes, such as support for automatically switching Bluetooth profiles when using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) apps like Skype, as well as the support of separate volumes for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP profiles.
Marked as fully compatible with the 1.1.0 branch of the OpenSSL toolkit, PulseAudio 10.0 now automatically starts pulseaudio.socket when using the systemd init system to start the sound server on your favorite Linux-based operating system.
Apart from that, the new PulseAudio release introduces a module called module-allow-passthrough, contributed by Collabora's devs, which can be used for prioritizing passthrough streams, and enables the memfd-based shared memory mechanism by default.
"Now we have a new module, called module-allow-passthrough, which will give higher priority to passthrough streams, so that if there are other streams playing when a passthrough stream is created, those other streams will be moved out of the way to a dummy device," reads today's announcement.
Other than that, PulseAudio 10.0 improves hotplugging support for USB surround sound cards, removes the json-c dependency, as well as the module-xenpv-sink module, and clarifies the qpaeq license included in the PulseAudio source tree.
PulseAudio 10.0 is available for download as a source tarball right now from our website if you fancy compiling software from sources, and will soon be available in the stable repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.