[lug] Soundly annoying

[Hugh Brown]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 09:34:51AM -0700, Jeffrey Haemer wrote:
> 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.
> 

If the driver is loaded as a module, you may be able to unload the kernel module and reload (modprobe -r <modulename>; modprobe <modulename>).

You may need to kill any process that are using the audio devices (under alsa it's /dev/snd*, not sure about pulseaudio).

Hugh