[lug] Soundly annoying

[Jeffrey Haemer]

Occasionally -- maybe once a month -- my sound card goes south.  Right now,
for example.  Sounds like a CD player trying to play a bad CD:
di-di-di-di-di-...

I have no idea what triggers it.  I can set things right again with a
re-boot, which I'm about to do.

*But* is there an easy way I can just reboot the sound card by itself?  Or,
if you think it's a wedged driver or app, is there a way I could just smack
those up side the head to get sound working again.  I hate rebooting.

Answers to easy questions follow, to keep having to answer them one at a
time:

- I'm running a fully patched, 64-bit version of the latest Ubuntu.

- Why yes, I have heard that Linux and sound don't always play together
perfecly. :-)

- This is my employer's machine.  No, I'm not going to go out and buy a
different sound card.

- Muting the sound, through the volume applet does mute it.

- Killing and restarting different music-playing apps (firefox, rhythmbox)
doesn't work.

- Killing pulseaudio will kills the sound, but then restarting it like this:

     /usr/bin/pulseaudio -D --log-target=syslog

(which I got from "ps ajax | grep pulseaudio" before killing it) doesn't
turn the sound back on.  Logfiles tell me this:

Feb 27 09:07:24 jsh-desktop-2 pulseaudio[23667]: ltdl-bind-now.c: Failed to
find original dlopen loader.
Feb 27 09:07:24 jsh-desktop-2 pulseaudio[23669]: pid.c: Stale PID file,
overwriting.
Feb 27 09:07:24 jsh-desktop-2 pulseaudio[23669]: main.c:
setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted
Feb 27 09:07:24 jsh-desktop-2 pulseaudio[23669]: main.c:
setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Operation not permitted

Pulseaudio and its gconf-helper do start, in the background, but I get a
non-zero return status, which, I suspect, is just another way of announcing
the failures I see in the log file.   I normally own both processes, but
even if I start the pulseaudio daemon as root, it doesn't fix things.

-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
720-837-8908 [cell]
303-997-1219 [Grand Central]
http://seejeffrun.blogspot.com
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