PulseAudio 15.0 Released with Support for LDAC and AptX Codecs, Improved Hardware Support

PulseAudio 15.0 Released with Support for LDAC and AptX Codecs, Improved Hardware Support

PulseAudio 15.0 sound server has been released today as a major update that introduces numerous new features and improvements for state-of-the-art sound support for Linux and UNIX systems.

Highlights of the PulseAudio 15.0 release include support for the LDAC and AptX Bluetooth codecs for A2DP, support for the high-quality SBC XQ configuration variants, native support for HFP Bluetooth profiles, as well as support for Bluetooth A2DP AVRCP Absolute Volume to control the volume of the connected A2DP device.

This major release also improves hardware support by adding support for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 USB gaming headsets, HP Thunderbolt Dock 120W G2 dock, OnePlus Type-C Bullets USB-C headset device, and Sennheiser GSX 1000 and 1200 PRO USB DACs for gaming.

Among other noteworthy changes, PulseAudio 15.0 introduces new command-line parameters for the pactl command, such as get-default-{sink|source}, get-{sink|source}-volume and get-{sink|source}-mute, adds support for setting sound card profiles as sticky, and lets you set module-alsa-card module arguments via udev configuration through a new udev variable called PULSE_MODARGS.

In addition, users can now configure the upper limit for latency of the module-null-source module with the max_latency_msec module argument, load the module-match module multiple times, and add ALSA path configuration files in their /home directory.

Also, the module-jackdbus-detect module now automatically loads JACK sink and source when JACK starts, the module-filter-apply module now automatically adds filter parameters from device properties, and the module-virtual-surround-sink module has been rewritten to support larger impulse responses.

For developers, PulseAudio 15.0 adds a new mechanism that they can use in their apps to disable shared memory on their connection to PulseAudio, as well as a new API that can be used for sending messages from clients to PulseAudio objects.

For packagers, PulseAudio now avoids the loading of X11 modules on Wayland, but the feature currently only works with the GNOME desktop environment, adds support for configuring OSS and Valgrind support in Meson, brings support for reading additional configuration from the /etc/pulse/default.pa.d/ directory to the startup script, and a new option to build client library and utilities only.

PulseAudio 15.0 is available for download as a source tarball for Linux OS maintainers right now from the official website. End users should wait for the new PulseAudio version to arrive in their distro’s stable software repositories before updating. For more details about the new features and improvements, visit the release notes.

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