This may be an issue with "npviewer.bin", which I'm pretty sure is Adobe Flash Player 10. I get the same sound problems if I leave a flash movie open for a day or so (even paused with no audio actually coming out). Things I did to get around this issue included turning off the automatic soundbyte play option when you hover over any audio clip or music file and switching all of my file open associations over to VLC, which as previously mentioned does not cause a problem.
Audacity no longer seems to _cause_ this problem; however, it is still affected by it. The audio being routed to my microphone... that may have been a configuration issue. I'm not 100% positive on that. What I am sure of is this: when the problem occurs, it's the digital line out that is affected (out of the digital audio port on the back of the computer, which uses a different wire than the standard headphone wire). It seems that this might not be affecting the normal line out negatively, but there are so many variables at play here that it's hard to tell. Unfortunately switching to a development kernel seems like a lot of work to do, but I haven't written it off entirely yet as an option if it helps my favorite Linux platform. ;-) If I recall correctly from a few years back, once compiled, it's really not a big deal to switch back to the kernel I'm presently using if I need to, right? Of course, if all the packages got upgraded because of the kernel upgrade, I'd be in hot water. That might not be an option. For anyone else experiencing this issue: the best thing I've managed to put together as a resolution here is a quick command line alias that WILL KILL ANY OPEN FLASH PROCESSES but WILL NOT KILL FIREFOX ENTIRELY (meaning the only content that has to be reloaded is any pages with flash content on them that you want to see, like YouTube, etcetera). This has worked VERY well for me personally, saving on loading times and bandwidth requirements, and TEMPORARILY restores sound to the machine; however, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY: USE THIS METHOD WITH CAUTION. So, all of that "shouting" out of the way, here's what I did to get sound working again: I added the following line to my "~/.cshrc" file (which I use because I originally learned Linux in TC Shell from HappyHacker.org tutorials instead of using BASH like everyone else, but I think it'll still work if you use bash and put it in your "~/.bashrc" file). alias rel-alsa 'sudo killall npviewer.bin; sudo killall pulseaudio; sudo alsa force-reload' Now, whenever audio goes away, I just pop open a command line console, type "rel-alsa", the flash processes die, and ALSA reloads successfully. After refreshing any flash page, audio is temporarily restored. It then cuts back out several hours later, with no definitive cause that I can trace yet. It's very rare that the audio dies while I am _actively_ watching something... it almost always seems to happen (at this point) when I leave the computer sitting for a few hours (like when I'm at work). Thanks to this temporary solution, it's not as much a headache for me at this point. No rush needed on a fix. Since the audio was still working when I got back from work today, I can't run that diagnostic command for you at the moment; however, the next time this happens to me, I'll make it a point to hop back over to this thread and give you more insight into the issue at hand. Shouldn't be long, since this still occurs almost daily. -- ALSA dies when certain processes glom sound drivers in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/408174 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
