PulseAudio 14.0 Released With Better USB Gaming Headset Support

While in 2021 we might begin to see PipeWire replacing PulseAudio by default at least on bleeding-edge distributions like Fedora, for now PulseAudio still is the dominant sound server used by desktop Linux distributions. Rolling out today is PulseAudio 14.0.

PulseAudio 14.0 comes with many changes compared to PulseAudio 13.0 that shipped all the way back in September of 2019. Among the changes to find with the new PulseAudio 14 release include:

- Big routing changes for the default sinks/sources handling.

- Automatic switching the audio output is now disabled by default as with PulseAudio 13.0 the change happened but was unintentional and caused some "very annoying behavior" for users.

- Better support for USB gaming headsets for the likes of the Razer Kraken Tournament Edition, SteelSeries Arctis 5, SteelSeries Arctis Pro, LucidSound LS31, and HyperX Cloud Orbit S.

- Improved support for ALSA UCM.

As a look ahead, PulseAudio 15 is planning to drop GConf support, the obsolete EsounD support is also planned for removal, and the Autotools build system support will also be removed.

More details on all of the changes to find with PulseAudio 14.0 can be found via the FreeDesktop.org Wiki. PulseAudio source downloads can be found via GitHub.