But, I wax philosophical. I finally decided to give in and listen to some music through my computer. Mainly a satellite radio I've gotten to run through it. I'm satisfied with the barest semblance of audio reproduction these days: it sounds a little better than an old mono phonograph playing 45's, which is fine. If I want better sound I'll visit a friend with a real stereo or go to a live performance. So, all would be fine if I could just keep my computer from suddenly ceasing to output sound for unknown reasons. I'm not really interested in troubleshooting the sound server so much as I am in a way of possibly resetting it short of rebooting the machine. Is there a way to do this, i.e., to shutdown, then restart the sound server to see if I can get the sound back without a reboot?
A few details, in case it's helpful. This is Ubuntu, a Debian variant. Sound hardware uses the snd_via82xx module--auto-detected and set up by the OS on installation. Things I've noted that cause sound output to cease: plugging/unplugging the speakers while the computer is running; plugging a usb device into a hub mounted on top of the computer case; and today I can't say that anything in particular caused this. The symptom is an end to all sounds: no music will play, nor will system sounds. Only the PC speaker remains operational. Sound comes back after a reboot. I'm hoping there's a way to stop, then restart the sound server and that this might resolve the problem when it occurs. I think this distro must use the ALSA sound server, if I've understood correctly these technical details.
Everything these days uses ALSA - the old OSS system is deprecated (and for good reasons). You can rmmod/modprobe the driver, and that will work sometimes, but on-motherboard sound systems are notoriously crappy.
Any advice? Go back to using a stereo-type device for sound and just use my computer for computing, perhaps?
Try Fedora. I'm using Fedora Core 2, with a custom-compiled kernel and a Sound Blaster Live, running the emu10k1 driver compiled in. The only problem I've ever had with it is when I went from a kernel module to a compiled-in driver - had to use the system-config-soundcard utility to reset everything.
Once my brother gets his Mac, I'll be grabbing the E-MU 0404 he has in his Windows box - now *that's* a sound card...
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