pulseaudio command not found

In this troubleshooting guide we learn how to fix pulseaudio command not found error message

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

pulseaudio: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: pulseaudio: command not found

Solutions to pulseaudio: command not found

How To Fix pulseaudio: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu pulseaudio is provided by pulseaudio package.

pulseaudio is:

PulseAudio, previously known as Polypaudio, is a sound server for POSIX and WIN32 systems. It is a drop in replacement for the ESD sound server with much better latency, mixing/re-sampling quality and overall architecture.

These are some of PulseAudio’s features:

  • High quality software mixing of multiple audio streams with support for more than one sink/source. May be used to combine multiple sound cards into one (with sample rate adjustment).

  • Wide range of supported client libraries. ESD, ALSA, oss, libao and GStreamer client applications are supported as-is. Native PulseAudio plug-ins are also available for xmms and mplayer.

  • Good low latency behaviour and very accurate latency measurement for playback and recording. Ability to fully synchronize multiple playback streams.

  • Network transparency, allowing an application to play back or record audio on a different machine than the one it is running on.

  • Extensible plug-in architecture with plug-ins for jackd, multicast-rtp lirc and avahi, just to name a few.

This package contains the daemon and basic module set.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install pulseaudio

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install pulseaudio.

sudo apt -y install pulseaudio

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install pulseaudio

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix pulseaudio command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.