pulseaudio-win32

An up-to-date PulseAudio build for Windows with an installer, service, and other improvements.

Features

• Various fixes and improvements.
• Standalone.
• Optional installer.
• Can run as a Windows Service.
• Working pactl/pacat.
• Working auto-connection to user and system instances.
• Working unix sockets for both user and system instances on Windows 10.
• Working modules.
• HTML documentation.
• Works on Windows 7 and later.

Limitations

• There are still some hard-coded paths which don't automatically relocate to the installation directory. This mainly affects the documentation.
• Locale files aren't currently included.

Building

mkdir -p ./build &&
docker build --tag pulseaudio-win32 --build-arg "PAW32_VERSION=$(echo "$(git describe --always --tags --dirty || echo unknown)" | sed -e "s/^v//g")" ./src &&
docker save pulseaudio-win32 |
tar -xOf - --wildcards '*/layer.tar' |
tar -xvf - -C ./build

Troubleshooting

• Service
  • Error: The process terminated unexpectedly
    Check PulseAudio's log. Note that it gets truncated every time PulseAudio starts.
  • Error: The environment is incorrect
    Something went wrong when finding the AppData folder. This error shouldn't happen.
  • Error: The specified service has been marked for deletion
    If you have services.msc open, close it and try again (it prevents service deletions from working properly). Otherwise, try killing pulseaudio.exe and pasvc.exe.
  • Permission errors for ProgramData
    If you attempted to run pulseaudio with the --system option manually or otherwise created conflicting files in ProgramData, delete them and start the service again.
  • Invalid argument errors when attempting to create the Unix socket for the system service
    This is caused by file permission errors when PulseAudio cannot delete or write to the socket file or the directory it's in. Try deleting the ProgramData folder for PulseAudio and restarting the service.
• Installer
  • The service does not get installed and/or started Try installing it manually from the command line with pasvc install.
  • The firewall rules do not get installed Try installing it manually from the command line with pasvcfw install.
• PulseAudio
  • Error: cannot create wakeup pipe
    If you are starting pulseaudio.exe from another process, ensure the SystemRoot environment variable is defined.
  • Audio is much louder than other apps at the same volume level or is distorted even when relatively quiet
    Try disabling audio effects on the output devices. Dolby Audio (e.g. the one preloaded on many devices) can cause this to happen if it is enabled even if all individual effects are turned off.

Silent installation

The installer uses Inno Setup 6 and supports the usual flags (e.g. /SILENT, /VERYSILENT).

The following components are available (all are selected by default) and can be passed as a comma separated list to /COMPONENTS=:

• pulseaudio (required) - PulseAudio daemon, modules, and tools
• documentation - HTML documentation.
• service - Windows Service.
• uninstall - Uninstallation support.

The following tasks are available when the service component is selected and can be passed as a comma separated list to /TASKS=:

• firewall - Add a firewall rule (4713/tcp).
  • firewall/deny - Deny all external connections.
  • firewall/allow - Allow external connections on private networks.
  • firewall/allowall - Allow all external connections.
  • firewall/allowalledge - Allow all external connections including edge traversal.
• svcmodload - Allow loading additional modules (note that this is a potential security risk).

The included configuration files in the installation directory will be overwritten on install and deleted on uninstall. To preserve your changes, place your custom configuration files in *.pa.d\*.pa and *.conf.d\*.conf.

Uninstalling will remove everything except for custom configuration files in the aforementioned folders.

Notes

While this repository is licensed under the MIT license, the icon and build output is licensed under the LGPL like PulseAudio itself (the PulseAudio build isn't linked to GPL libraries).

Patches

The following patches were created for pulseaudio-win32.