pulseaudio

About pulseaudio

From Debian's package description

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.

From Debian's description of the pulseaudio package, under that package's license.