Audio software for Linux

professional sound server daemon

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.

PipeWire is a low-level server and multimedia framework for handling audio and video streams on Linux. Created by Wim Taymans at Red Hat, it aims to unify audio and video processing by providing low-latency capture and playback functionality. PipeWire facilitates advanced multimedia routing and pipeline processing, and is designed to replace and be compatible with existing sound systems.

aRts (which stands for analog real time synthesizer) is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It was best known for previously being used in K Desktop Environment 2 and 3 to simulate an analog synthesizer.

Sound server

free software

free software for audio spectrum anlysis