PulseAudio 16.0 Released with Bluetooth Battery Level Reporting

PulseAudio 16.0 release brings a handful of changes across its components.

PulseAudio is a network sound-server which is distributed via the FreeDesktop project and it is still widely used due to its stability and popularity.

Although PipeWire is gaining traction with major Linux distributions adopting it by default, PulseAudio still continues with its development and improvement. And it should continue to do so. It’s always better to have two options.

Even today, while PipeWire is still maturing, PulseAudio is the default standard for many Linux distros and also a go-to solution for critical audio work.

PulseAudio 16.0 – What’s New

PulseAudio 16.0 brings a huge list of changes and here are some of the important ones.

1. Bluetooth device battery level reporting added
2. Stream latency reports now include resampler delay
3. Channel remixing can be disabled for module-combine-sink
4. pactl can show information in JSON format
5. Increased flexibility for module-jackdbus-detect
6. The tunnel and combine-sink latency reporting accuracy has been improved, which should help with audio synchronization issues.
7. If a bluetooth device supports battery level reporting, PulseAudio now is able to forward the information to other software.
8. The tunnel sink and source modules used to have a fixed 250 ms latency. The desired latency can now be configured with the latency_msec module argument.
9. Fix input issues for Texas Instruments PCM2902 based sound cards

All these updates should be included in the upcoming packaging of major Linux distros. If my guess is correct, you should get this update in Ubuntu 22.10 and Fedora 37 due end of this year.

For more details about this release, visit the official announcement.

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