I am trying to write an audio application in Linux using PulseAudio. What library would I be able to use that would allow me to interact with the PulseAudio daemon and write an audio application for Linux in the C programming language?

This is what the audio application will need to be able to do:
* play audio file on selection
* display vu meter info
* get audio signal amplitude in variable
* display audio spectrum

Any support libs would also be useful. Are there man pages for them too?

Note that a google search for "libpulse-dev" came up empty. If there are some LQ pages with useful info then reply with the LQ page too.

On Debian-based distros it should be libpulse-dev. On RPM-based it should be pulseaudio-libs.

Obviously you should start here.

jcookeman, thanks for the lib names. I had looked for libpulse-dev in the installation manager and did not find it because I had misread it when I looked in "available" packages and it was already installed! (too much tv?)

libpulse-dev seems to be the library that I was looking for. I also installed pulseaudio-libs, though this is a "virtual" package that is included for backwards compatibility.

libpulse-dev includes the following:
/usr/lib: libpulse-browse.so, libpulse-mainloop-glib.so, libpulse-simple.so, libpulse.so

/usr/share/doc/packages/libpulse-dev/html

I plan to take a look at the documentation to see if that will be what will allow me to write the audio application in Linux. There were a few other pulseaudio libs that I also installed, and one is a plugin for audacious, an audio application for Linux that does some of the things that I was trying to do, so I can take a look at how they code parts of it (but they would be using different calls).

Any additional answers to the original post are of course welcome.