PulseAudio 17.0
PulseAudio is a sound server, originally created to overcome the limitations of the Enlightened Sound Daemon (EsounD). A sound server can serve many functions: Software mixing of multiple audio streams, bypassing any restrictions the hardware has. Network transparency, allowing an application to play back or record audio on a different machine than the one it is running on. Sound API abstraction, alleviating the need for multiple backends in applications to handle the wide diversity of sound s