Sound stop working in Intrepid Ibex

[h3]

It rarely stop by itself, if I'm only listening to music it can work for hours. However, most of the time when I come to work in the morning I find out the sound isn't working. Not a single sound will come out of my machine until I either perform a alsa force-reload or reboot.

I think I noticed a pattern.

First I listen to music on hypem.com, then after a while hit pause and either go to lunch or go home. If a Flash animation is left open and is outputting sound, even if paused, I'm 90% sure to find the sound server crashed when I come back.

I get no error messages, just the absence of sound. Some applications, like totem, disable the sound buttons like if it was incapable of accessing the sound server.

Another annoying thing, when I force-reload alsa, every application accessing the sound server (even when it doesn't work) crashes and close instantly. Even Firefox can't recover and forget the opened tabs and starts a new session when restarted.

I use Ubuntu since Edgy and I never had any sound problems until Pulseaudio was introduced.. I don't know if there is a correlation, but it's suspicious and deadly annoying.

[salubrium (mcampbell-mosqhoy)]

I get a similar problem and I can't track down what causes it. It seems to only have been introduced in Ibex.

Sometimes when I am playing AssaultCube, sound just suddenly dies and when that happens I can only fix it by rebooting. Other times if I try and start AssaultCube I get no sound. I have to do a sudo alsa reload which then complains that mixer_applet and pulseaudio are using it, I then pkill them and so another sudo alsa reload. From there, I can play Assaultcube.

But it is not just related to AssaultCube. Sometimes listening to Rhythmbox and Skype starts ringing but it has no sound. Then I close rhythmbox to test skype problem and reopen rhythmbox and I it also has no sound.

I'm on 64bit Ubuntu Ibex

[dayo (3-contactdayo-gmail-com)]

I have a similar issue on both Hardy and Ibex. When I have Pidgin and Rhythmbox open. Both have sound. When I stop Rhythmbox but leave it and Pidgin open, then go into Suspend, I lose sound after coming out of Suspend.
However, if I close Rhythmbox, and send someone and IM with Pidgin, for the purpose of getting Pidgin to make a sound ..... and then go into Suspend, sound is ok once I get back out of Suspend.

Sometimes, I might have Pidgin open, then play a movie on Totem. Then leave Totem open and play another moive on Kaffeine (because it didn't play on Totem). Then stop the video and go do other stuff, and come back to my laptop after half an hour or so, and the only sound to be heard is me cursing at my laptop.

[jay armstrong (jayarmstrong)]

I have the same issue here, though I haven't isolated it to flash content (will look into that). It seems that pulseaudio crashes, and does it very frequently - sometimes within 30 minutes. Regardless, if it's pulseaudio that's crashing for you, try "killall -9 pulseaudio" in the terminal (I'm not sure what the -9 does but it seems necessary for this workaround). Then run pulseaudio from the Run box or from the terminal if you want to watch it crash again. You will need to restart any program you want to hear after you restart pulseaudio. The nice thing is that this is a lot faster than rebooting (though I have to do it five times a day) and it works every time :) Good luck.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release the Karmic Koala. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[jay armstrong (jayarmstrong)]

@pedro
this issue seems more or less fixed in Jaunty. I've only had pulseaudio crash about twice since Jaunty came out.

[doobiest (launchpad-doobiest)]

This is the most relevant bug I can find related to my issue. I dont believe this issue is related to any specific process in particular, I've noticed various times my sound stops working. I'll do an fuser /dev/snd/* and I'll kill any PIDs that it returns. Upon killing those PIDs I instantly hear sound from what ever application was waiting it's turn to get access to my sound device.

I've had this issue for years actually, on various versions of ubuntu.

2 things:

1) I'd like /etc/init.d/alsa.utils restart or /tec/init.d/pulseaudio restart to forcefully terminate any processes attached to /dev/snd/*

2) In the interest of customer satisfaction and user-friendliness. Add an option under the context menu for the volume control systray app to kill any of these processes in one click. An option like 'refresh sound device'. That way when any of my less experience friends, who I've convinced to switch to linux, calls me and says, "Hey my sound isnt working", I'll only have to say, "right click on the volume icon and click refresh". No diving into the command line or rebooting to correct this.

It's a terrible user experience. More and more end users/low skilled users are giving ubuntu a try because it's awesome and secure and free. Stuff like this will make them switch back to XP and make me cry.

I've had this happen often on ubuntu 7 and 8 on several computers. I cannot recall right now if that happens on jaunty. However if no method has been introduced to determine if something is hanging on the sound card's socket then a GUI based option to kill it all off should be added.

Everytime I find a little bug that need some console intervention, I wish there was a point and click solution for the less experience people out there. Like a window containing buttons which describe point and click fixes, which invoke a backend script to provide the solution. Something like this could even output the details of the script which can help new users understand how their system just got fixed.

Thanks.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

1. The alsa-utils initscript (re)stores mixer settings. It has nothing to do
with reloading sound drivers. Instead, see the /sbin/alsa script. Likewise,
the pulseaudio initscript should not touch the sound drivers.

2. Providing a GUI method to kill processes as root already exists, but
special-casing a "kill all other sound processes" [that would run as root]
GUI method is very bad. It does not resolve the actual bug, which is that a
badly configured application will prevent others from having audible sound.
The correct solution is to fix the applications. Any other way is just
shoddily papering over the bug.

On Nov 26, 2009 1:36 PM, "doobiest" <email address hidden> wrote:

This is the most relevant bug I can find related to my issue. I dont
believe this issue is related to any specific process in particular,
I've noticed various times my sound stops working. I'll do an fuser
/dev/snd/* and I'll kill any PIDs that it returns. Upon killing those
PIDs I instantly hear sound from what ever application was waiting it's
turn to get access to my sound device.

I've had this issue for years actually, on various versions of ubuntu.

2 things:

1) I'd like /etc/init.d/alsa.utils restart or /tec/init.d/pulseaudio
restart to forcefully terminate any processes attached to /dev/snd/*

2) In the interest of customer satisfaction and user-friendliness. Add
an option under the context menu for the volume control systray app to
kill any of these processes in one click. An option like 'refresh sound
device'. That way when any of my less experience friends, who I've
convinced to switch to linux, calls me and says, "Hey my sound isnt
working", I'll only have to say, "right click on the volume icon and
click refresh". No diving into the command line or rebooting to correct
this.

It's a terrible user experience. More and more end users/low skilled
users are giving ubuntu a try because it's awesome and secure and free.
Stuff like this will make them switch back to XP and make me cry.

I've had this happen often on ubuntu 7 and 8 on several computers. I
cannot recall right now if that happens on jaunty. However if no method
has been introduced to determine if something is hanging on the sound
card's socket then a GUI based option to kill it all off should be
added.

Everytime I find a little bug that need some console intervention, I
wish there was a point and click solution for the less experience people
out there. Like a window containing buttons which describe point and
click fixes, which invoke a backend script to provide the solution.
Something like this could even output the details of the script which
can help new users understand how their system just got fixed.

Thanks.

-- Sound stop working in Intrepid Ibex
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/348115 You received this bu...
Status in “pulseaudio” package in Ubuntu: Incomplete

Bug description:

It rarely stop by itself, if I'm only listening to music it can work for
hours. However, most of the...

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

There has been no activity on this bug for a while. Is this issue still reproduceable with either Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 with all updates installed, or Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 alpha 3?

Thanks.

[dayo (3-contactdayo-gmail-com)]

I don't use Ibex anymore. I use Jaunty now, and it's only happened twice or so in almost a year.
I "fix" it with `sudo alsa force-reload`.

[h3 (h3)]

I use Karmic and I still use the `sudo alsa force-reload` trick to bring
back sound at least once or twice a day ..

I still have the strong impression that Flash is the culprit.

--

 Maxime Haineault
 Consultant Web / Associé

∞ Motion Média
  http://motion-m.ca
  <email address hidden>
  [phone]

2010/3/1 dayo <email address hidden>

> I don't use Ibex anymore. I use Jaunty now, and it's only happened twice or
> so in almost a year.
> I "fix" it with `sudo alsa force-reload`.
>
> --
> Sound stop working in Intrepid Ibex
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/348115
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for pulseaudio (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]