Ubuntu
pulseaudio package

Pulseaudio version 17 for Ubuntu 24.04-LTS?

Asked by Mario Kleiner

Are there plans to upgrade to Pulseaudio version 17 for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04-LTS Nutty Numbat release?

Pulseaudio 17 was already released 12 th January 2024, and I can't see any upgrade activity? Neither on the Debian side, where the maintainers seem to not do much maintaining anymore?

I know that upcoming Ubuntu uses pipewire as its default desktop sound server, so pulseaudio may not seem as relevant anymore.

But I assume that a large proportion of audio client applications shipping with Ubuntu 24.04 will not yet have a native pipewire client backend, but instead a pulseaudio backend. While such apps can talk to pipewire via the pipewire pulseaudio fronted, they still use the libpulse.so.0 Pulseaudio client library, which is not part of pipewire, but of the installed pulseaudio packages.

As such, even when running against a pipewire sound server, all the pulseaudio client apps will still suffer from limitations and bugs present in older versions of libpulse.so.0 as part of old pulseaudio packages, currently shipping the outdated 16.1, which have long been fixed in the new pulseaudio17 release. This also affects, e.g., GStreamer, whose default selected audio plugins are for pulseaudio, not for pipewire yet.

This is affecting my own application octave-psychtoolbox-3 as a user of GStreamer and thereby the pulseaudio sound output. See our bug https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/issues/814#issuecomment-1723827374 caused by GStreamer bug https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/-/issues/1735 caused by pulseaudio bug https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues/1383

The bug was reported against pipewire as well https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3399 and then closed as "not a pipewire bug, but a pulseaudio bug fixed in Pulseaudio 17".

Thanks for consideration.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu pulseaudio Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Manfred Hampl
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Best Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

Ubuntu is copying packages from Debian (to avoid double packaging work), and if Debian does not have version 17 yet (see https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/pulseaudio ), then I do not see much chance, that Ubuntu will implement that version soon.

If there is a severe bug in the current versions, then please create a bug report with the link to the merge request, e.g. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/745/diffs
I assume that this patch will also work on older versions of the software.

Remark: Debian Import Freeze for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS NOBLE Numbat was already last week, so any change in Debian will come too late for Ubuntu 24.04 or requires a freeze exception.

Revision history for this message
Mario Kleiner (mario-kleiner) said : 		#2

Thanks for the help. I filed a bug report under https://bugs.launchpad.net/pipewire/+bug/2056079

I knew about the Debian -> Ubuntu process, but hoped the Debian maintainers would pull in an up to date Pulseaudio 17 in time for the import freeze, given it was on their dashboard as "high priority" since 1.5 months. No such luck.

Therefore now this attempt to still get it into Ubuntu, after the import freeze deadline has passed. My assumption was that keeping PA up to date was still a priority, given that while Pipewire is now the desktop audio server of choice, the large number of pulseaudio client applications in Ubuntu - including GStreamer - still require well working pulseaudio client libraries or tooling even under pipewire.

Anyhow, thanks for the help!
-mario

Revision history for this message
Mario Kleiner (mario-kleiner) said : 		#3

Thanks Manfred Hampl, that solved my question.