14 DAY TRIAL // PulseAudio, the open-source sound system/server used by numerous Linux-based operating systems by default, has been updated to version 13, a major release that introduces new features and improvements.
Released three months after the PulseAudio 12 series, PulseAudio 13 is here with support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, support for the SteelSeries Arctis 5 USB headset, improved initial card profile selection for ALSA cards, as well as S/PDIF improvements for CMEDIA USB2.0 High-Speed True HD Audio.
The PulseAudio 13 series also adds several new module arguments, including "max_latency_msec" for module-loopback, "stream_name" for module-rtp-send, and "avoid_resampling" for module-udev-detect and module-alsa-card, and no longer uses persistent Bluetooth card profile choices by default, recommending users to use A2DP by default.
"Which profile to use with Bluetooth is highly context dependent (HSP/HFP for phone calls, A2DP for everything else), so there's not much point in saving user's profile choices. It's better to just use A2DP by default and switch to HSP when necessary (automatically when possible)," reads the release notes.
BlueZ 4 support removed
Among other noteworthy changes present in the PulseAudio 13 release, we can mention a new function that facilitates the enablement of realtime scheduling for client threads, new convenience functions for fetching various parameters from pa_format_info, and the ability to use channel map and source sample spec by default in module-loopback.
PulseAudio 13 also removes support for the deprecated BlueZ 4 Bluetooth kernel modules implementation, and drops support for the intltool translation tools. This is also the first release of the open-source to adopt the new Meson build system. You can download PulseAudio 13.0 right now through our free software portal or from your distro's stable repositories.