It came to our attention that some people really disliked the name of Polypaudio, because it reminded them of that medical condition, though the software was actually named after the sea dweller. I actually liked that double entendre, but many did not and expressed concerns that the name would hinder Polypaudio's adoption. After a long discussion on #polypaudio we came to the conclusion that a name change is a good idea in this case. Name changes are usually a bad idea, but this time it's worth it, we think.

The new name we agreed on is PulseAudio, or shorter just Pulse. It has the nice advantage that it abbreviates to pa, just as Polypaudio did. This allows us to keep source code compatiblity (and binary compatibility to a certain degree) with the current releases of Polypaudio, because the symbol prefix can stay pa_. In addition the auxiliary tools paman, pavucontrol, pavumeter need not to be renamed.

We will try to make the transition as smooth as possible and would like to apologize to all the packagers, who need to rename their packages now.

The next release of Polypaudio (0.9.2) will be a bugfix release and be the first to bear the new name: PulseAudio 0.9.2.

Polypaudio is dead. Long live PulseAudio!