PulseAudio

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams. PulseAudio is free and open-source software, and is licensed under the terms of the LGPL-2.1-or-later. It was created in 2004 under the name Polypaudio but was renamed in 2006 to PulseAudio. PulseAudio competes with newer PipeWire, which provides a compatible PulseAudio server (known as pipewire-pulse), and PipeWire is now used by default on many Linux distributions, including Fedora Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian.