How To Install pulseaudio on Ubuntu
Posted on April 1, 2023 (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )
3 minutes • 491 words
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install pulseaudio on Ubuntu.
What is pulseaudio
pulseaudio is:
PulseAudio, previously known as Polypaudio, is a sound server for POSIX and WIN32 systems. It is a drop in replacement for the ESD sound server with much better latency, mixing/re-sampling quality and overall architecture.
These are some of PulseAudio’s features:
High quality software mixing of multiple audio streams with support for more than one sink/source. May be used to combine multiple sound cards into one (with sample rate adjustment).
Wide range of supported client libraries. ESD, ALSA, oss, libao and GStreamer client applications are supported as-is. Native PulseAudio plug-ins are also available for xmms and mplayer.
Good low latency behaviour and very accurate latency measurement for playback and recording. Ability to fully synchronize multiple playback streams.
Network transparency, allowing an application to play back or record audio on a different machine than the one it is running on.
Extensible plug-in architecture with plug-ins for jackd, multicast-rtp lirc and avahi, just to name a few.
This package contains the daemon and basic module set.
There are three methods to install pulseaudio on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install pulseaudio Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install pulseaudio using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install pulseaudio
Install pulseaudio Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install pulseaudio using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install pulseaudio
Install pulseaudio Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install pulseaudio using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install pulseaudio
How To Uninstall pulseaudio on Ubuntu
To uninstall only the pulseaudio package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
Uninstall pulseaudio And Its Dependencies
To uninstall pulseaudio and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove pulseaudio
Remove pulseaudio Configurations and Data
To remove pulseaudio configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge pulseaudio
Remove pulseaudio configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove pulseaudio configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge pulseaudio
Dependencies
pulseaudio have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install pulseaudio package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.