PulseAudio 15 Released With Bluetooth Improvements, Better Hardware Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PulseAudio 15 Released With Bluetooth Improvements, Better Hardware Support

While PipeWire continues on a nice upward trajectory for fulfilling the roles of PulseAudio and JACK along with other audio/video stream management needs, PulseAudio isn't letting up yet and on Tuesday saw its big version 15.0 release...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PulseAudio-15.0

[binarybanana]

Very nice.
The new virtual-surround-sound convolution engine should bring up the quality closer to that of HeSuVi and supports more than 5.1 channels. I've been waiting for this.

[holunder]

Does someone know how they managed to support LDAC and AptX (HD)? As far as I know, LDAC had licence conflicts and AptX patent issues.

[sheepdestroyer]

Does someone know how they managed to support LDAC and AptX (HD)? As far as I know, LDAC had licence conflicts and AptX patent issues.

Same as with PipeWire
For aptX / aptX HD, you need to install libopenaptx by yourself : https://github.com/pali/libopenaptx
If the lib's there, those codecs should work.

For LDAC, at least in Fedora, the lib is in the official repo : libldac.x86_64 2.0.2.3-8.fc34 @fedora

[Vistaus]

Very nice.
The new virtual-surround-sound convolution engine should bring up the quality closer to that of HeSuVi and supports more than 5.1 channels. I've been waiting for this.

Quality and PulseAudio… that's not something I often hear in the same sentence within the Linux community

[Berniyh]

Nice that they finally managed to get that in, but (for me) it's too late. I switched to pipewire already since it provided aptx support.

Also, if you look at the history of aptx Support in Pulseaudio, it's crazy how long it took them to get there.
Was another reason for me to switch rather sooner than later.

[Sesivany]

For LDAC, at least in Fedora, the lib is in the official repo : libldac.x86_64 2.0.2.3-8.fc34 @fedora

The problem was that libldac is released under MIT and for quite some time upstream claimed LGPL 2.1 software can't link MIT software. I would also like to hear what changed their mind. Pipewire has never had that problem because it's also released under MIT.

[binarybanana]

Quality and PulseAudio… that's not something I often hear in the same sentence within the Linux community

Although I only started using it a few years ago when I wanted to seamlessly switch between internal output and HDMI. NBut I never had any issues. Even latency is great with MuQSS (< 2ms).

[Old Nobody]

Same as with PipeWire
For aptX / aptX HD, you need to install libopenaptx by yourself : https://github.com/pali/libopenaptx
If the lib's there, those codecs should work.

For LDAC, at least in Fedora, the lib is in the official repo : libldac.x86_64 2.0.2.3-8.fc34 @fedora

The maintainer of libopenaptx states in libopenaptx's README file:

As Freedesktop and Collabora projects are continuously abusing and violating license of this project and claiming that they can do it as it is supported by their own Code of Conduct (including censorship practising, removal of all user reports mentioning these activities, banning these users and not explaining anything), this library and any other project which uses this library must not be used or distributed in any Freedesktop or Collabora project, application or library, either in source code, loaded or linked at compile time or at runtime either directly or transitionally throw additional wrapper library or in any other similar form.

Pulseaudio and PipeWire are both Freedesktop projects. Seems the author is more keen on acting like a prima donna.

[Daktyl198]

Glad pulse is still getting updates for now. PipeWire can’t see any of the audio devices on my system (hdmi or USB DAC) so it’s impossible to use it. Pulse only for me, for a while longer.