Pulseaudio

Pulseaudio is a brand new sound server system for linux.

project website

On the Gentoo Wiki

command line

* list devices/clients:
pactl list

• list ESOUND handlers

elwood ~ # eselect esd list
Available ESounD implementations:
 [1]   ESounD original *
 [2]   PulseAudio
elwood ~ # eselect esd set 2

Use flags

• list me the packages actually using pulseaudio use flag:

equery hasuse pulseaudio

• from how I've understood it, (I've been studying about several sound systems like oss,esd,alsa,sox specialized all in different branches of "the sound" and all are following the evolution of GNU projects)...

... Pulseaudio uses ALSA , down there, still taking care of the hardware layer. I got this quickly, as it looks pretty functional and I was speculating about alsa doing "to much stuff" without an application abstraction level "helper". this means that is not a replacement, is not the new complete system, but indeed it's amplifying the before tiny user funcions given from alsa (that is doing the hard job with the hardware). Another big step for the all open source community. ...and this means, again, you must specify the alsa use flag to compile it with that support.

emerge -pv pulseaudio
media-sound/pulseaudio-0.9.22-r2  USE="X alsa asyncns avahi bluetooth caps dbus glib ipv6 jack libsamplerate tcpd udev -doc -gnome -lirc (-oss) -realtime (-system-wide) -test" 0 kB