PulseAudio Documentation

Introduction

This document describes the client API for the PulseAudio sound server. The API comes in two flavours to accommodate different styles of applications and different needs in complexity:

• The complete but somewhat complicated to use asynchronous API
• The simplified, easy to use, but limited synchronous API

All strings in PulseAudio are in the UTF-8 encoding, regardless of current locale. Some functions will filter invalid sequences from the string, some will simply fail. To ensure reliable behaviour, make sure everything you pass to the API is already in UTF-8.

Simple API

Use this if you develop your program in synchronous style and just need a way to play or record data on the sound server. See Simple API for more details.

Asynchronous API

Use this if you develop your programs in asynchronous, event loop based style or if you want to use the advanced features of the PulseAudio API. A guide can be found in Asynchronous API.

By using the built-in threaded main loop, it is possible to acheive a pseudo-synchronous API, which can be useful in synchronous applications where the simple API is insufficient. See the Asynchronous API page for details.

Threads

The PulseAudio client libraries are not designed to be directly thread-safe. They are however designed to be reentrant and threads-aware.

To use the libraries in a threaded environment, you must assure that all objects are only used in one thread at a time. Normally, this means that all objects belonging to a single context must be accessed from the same thread.

The included main loop implementation is also not thread safe. Take care to make sure event objects are not manipulated when any other code is using the main loop.

pkg-config

The PulseAudio libraries provide pkg-config snippets for the different modules:

• libpulse - The asynchronous API and the internal main loop implementation.
• libpulse-mainloop-glib - GLIB 2.x main loop bindings.
• libpulse-simple - The simple PulseAudio API.