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.