.TH APULSE 1 2017-10-23 "apulse" "apulse" .SH NAME .B apulse \- The PulseAudio emulator for \fBALSA\fR .SH SYNOPSIS .B apulse .RI .RI [program-parameters]... .SH DESCRIPTION The program provides an alternative partial implementation of the PulseAudio API. It consists of a loader script and a number of shared libraries with the same names as from original PulseAudio, so applications could dynamically load them and think they are talking to PulseAudio. Internally, no separate sound mixing daemon is used. Instead, \fBapulse\fR relies on \fBALSA\fR's \fBdmix\fR, \fBdsnoop\fR, and \fBplug\fR plugins to handle multiple sound sources and capture streams running at the same time. \fBdmix\fR plugin muxes multiple playback streams; \fBdsnoop\fR plugin allow multiple applications to capture from a single microphone; and \fBplug\fR plugin transparently converts audio between various sample formats, sample rates and channel numbers. For more than a decade now, \fBALSA\fR comes with these plugins enabled and configured by default. \fBapulse\fR wasn't designed to be a drop-in replacement of PulseAudio. It's pointless, since that will be just reimplementation of original PulseAudio, with the same client-daemon architecture, required by the complete feature set. Instead, only parts of the API that are crucial to specific applications are implemented. That's why there is a loader script, named \fBapulse\fR. It updates value of LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point also to the directory where \fBapulse\fR's libraries are installed, making them available to the application. Name comes from names of both \fBALSA\fR and PulseAudio. As \fBaoss\fR was a compatibility layer between OSS programs and \fBALSA\fR, \fBapulse\fR was designed to be compatibility layer between PulseAudio applications and \fBALSA\fR. .SH RETURN VALUE \fBapulse\fR is a simple shell wrapper script that calls \fBexec\fR on the program given in parameters. Except for cases when the wrapper itself fails to load, return value is the return value of that program. .SH EXAMPLE Run a newer Firefox browser with fake PulseAudio: .nf .sp apulse firefox .fi .SH AUTHORS \fBapulse\fR was written by Rinat Ibragimov in 2014-2017.