PulseAudio

Depending on which applications you use, you might need to provide PulseAudio with a D-BUS session bus (e.g. via dbus-run-session) or a D-BUS system bus (via the dbus service).

For applications which use ALSA directly and don't support PulseAudio, the alsa-plugins-pulseaudio package can make them use PulseAudio through ALSA.

The PulseAudio package comes with a service file, which is not necessary in most setups - the PulseAudio maintainers discourage using a system-wide setup. Instead, PulseAudio will automatically start when needed.

There are several methods of allowing PulseAudio to access to audio devices. The simplest one is to add your user to the audio group. Alternatively, you can use a session manager, like elogind.