PulseAudio: New Version with Support in KDE 4.4

As Colin Guthrie writes in his blog, his work on Phonon now adds support for PulseAudio in KDE's trunk branch. The code should then land with the end-user in KDE 4.4.

A couple of patches Guthrie included in the release to initiate the changes in the distributions have since become redundant. A new PulseAudio version 0.9.21 was issued to address the patches.

The new PulseAudio version provides a few bugfixes but also integrates Guthrie's device-manager module. A recent article in Web Upd8 encourages upgrading PulseAudio to 0.9.21 in Ubuntu 9.10 from a Launchpad repository (PPA). At the same time it suggests doing so only when experiencing audio problems. The version is still experimental and a repository is available for Ubuntu 9.10 only.

The recommendation for adding the repository and upgrading to PulseAudio 0.9.21 is to use two commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade