Pulse Audio is the new audio server software shipped with several modern Linux distros (Ubuntu, Fedora Core etc.). This is a little page I'm writing, to collect useful information about this system. Pulse Audio replaces older audio server systems like esound (gnome) and aRts (KDE), at least I hope they will.
Features
Installation and usage
Volume control
Other tips
Running non-pulseaudio applications
Since PulseAudio grabs the sound device, you can not have non-PA enabled applications use the sound driver. This can be worked around by simply suspending PulseAudio for a moment, using the pasuspender application. For example, to run audacity, I do
$ pasuspender -- audacity