The next step

A few minutes ago, I finally released PulseAudio 0.9.7. Changes are numerous, especially internally where the core is now threaded and mostly lock-free. Check the rough list on the milestone page, announcement email. As many of you know we are shipping a pre-release of 0.9.7 in Fedora 8, enabled by default. The final release offers quite a few additions over that prerelease. To show off a couple of nice features, here's a screencast, showing hotplug, simultaneous playback (what Apple calls aggregation) and zeroconfish network support:

Please excuse the typos. Yes, I still use XMMS, don't ask [1]. Yes, you need a bit of imagination to fully appreciate a screencast that lacks an audio track -- but demos audio software.

So, what's coming next? Earcandy, timer-based scheduling/"glitch-free" audio, scriptability through Lua, the todo list is huge. My unnoffical, scratchy, partly german TODO list for PulseAudio is available online.

As it appears all relevant distros will now move to PA by default. So, hopefully, PA is coming to a desktop near you pretty soon. -- Oh, you are one of those who still don't see the benefit of a desktop sound server? Then, please reread this too long email of mine, or maybe this ars.technica article.

OTOH, if you happen to like this release, then consider giving me a kudo on ohloh.net, my ego wants a golden 10. ;-)

Footnotes:

[1] Those music players which categorize audio by ID3 tags just don't work for me, because most of my music files are very badly named. However, my directory structure is very well organized, but all those newer players don't care about directory structures as it seems. XMMS doesn't really either, but xmms . does the job from the terminal.

Flameeyes, thank's for hosting this clip.