One of our main goals here at Collabora is to move the open source multimedia platform forward. Due to this we are investing a lot of time and effort into projects such as GStreamer, Telepathy, PiTiVi, Empathy and PulseAudio. So when we are able to play our part in making sure open source and linux desktops keep abreast of current development, like our work on WebM with Google and Entropy Wave we of course feel extra happy.

Well I thought it was time to announce another important effort we have just undertaken. Thanks to the generous support of NLnet, the same guys who helped Collabora make the Muji multi party chat extension for XMPP, we are now kicking of an effort to add echo cancellation support to Pulse Audio.

The goal of this effort is to make it possible to hook in various kind of audio effects into PulseAudio, including echo cancellation, so that as an application you can just tell PulseAudio that you want it to give you echo cancellation between an incoming and outgoing channel. As a starting point we will port some open source echo cancellation implementations to this framework, with one of them ending up as the default (the goal is that applications can just ask for the default, but that they can also ask for a specific one if it doesn’t want the default for some reason).

We hope this work will have a lot of positive long term effects, easier support for echo cancellation in applications, new improved echo cancellation algorithms and implementations being released and improved audio drivers on the linux desktop (not all drivers are doing a good job currently).

So in the coming weeks Wim Taymans will be leading this effort on our side and I will try to keep you up to date on it as it progresses.

So a big thanks to NLnet for making this possible.