What is "pulseaudio"

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed by freedesktop.org. It runs on Linux, the BSDs including Mac OS X, Solaris and Microsoft Windows operating systems, although the Windows version has not been updated since 2011 and is now 8 versions behind.

PulseAudio is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1.

It was created in 2004 under the name Polypaudio but was renamed in 2006 to PulseAudio.