Configuring Sound on Linux/Pulse Audio/Pulse apps

A typical PulseAudio distribution comes with numerous different programs. Refer to the man pages for more information. All official PulseAudio applications are prefixed with pa.

paplay

Plays wavs and select other audio files. This is not an mp3 player.

pacat

Plays and records streams

PulseAudio alternative to aplay

pasuspender

Permits another device to access the sound device directly. Typically this is used for applications that can not plug into pulseaudio.

pactl

Controls the running pulseaudio server/daemon.

padsp

Creates a dsp and other devices for a transparent abstraction of a non-existent device.

pacmd

PulseAudio shell into pactl