NAME

       apulse - The PulseAudio emulator for ALSA

SYNOPSIS

       apulse <program-name> [program-parameters]...

DESCRIPTION

       The program provides an alternative partial implementation of the PulseAudio API. It consists of a loader
       script  and a number of shared libraries with the same names as from original PulseAudio, so applications
       could dynamically load them and think they are talking  to  PulseAudio.  Internally,  no  separate  sound
       mixing daemon is used. Instead, apulse relies on ALSA's dmix, dsnoop, and plug plugins to handle multiple
       sound  sources and capture streams running at the same time. dmix plugin muxes multiple playback streams;
       dsnoop plugin allow  multiple  applications  to  capture  from  a  single  microphone;  and  plug  plugin
       transparently  converts  audio between various sample formats, sample rates and channel numbers. For more
       than a decade now, ALSA comes with these plugins enabled and configured by default.

       apulse wasn't designed to be a drop-in replacement of PulseAudio. It's pointless, since that will be just
       reimplementation of original PulseAudio, with  the  same  client-daemon  architecture,  required  by  the
       complete  feature  set.   Instead,  only  parts  of the API that are crucial to specific applications are
       implemented. That's why there is a loader script, named  apulse.  It  updates  value  of  LD_LIBRARY_PATH
       environment  variable  to point also to the directory where apulse's libraries are installed, making them
       available to the application.

       Name comes from names of both ALSA and PulseAudio. As aoss was a compatibility layer between OSS programs
       and ALSA, apulse was designed to be compatibility layer between PulseAudio applications and ALSA.

RETURN VALUE

       apulse is a simple shell wrapper script that calls exec on the program given in  parameters.  Except  for
       cases when the wrapper itself fails to load, return value is the return value of that program.

EXAMPLE

       Run a newer Firefox browser with fake PulseAudio:

            apulse firefox

AUTHORS

       apulse was written by Rinat Ibragimov in 2014-2017.

apulse                                             2017-10-23                                          APULSE(1)