Anyway, so far installing the proposed generic kernel and making the edits to defaults.conf has stopped this behaviour and I'm able to listen to full albums without pulseaudio dying.
In fact, I'm reasonably surprised at how well this generic kernel handles my firewire interface with minimum xruns in jack with pretty good latency (<10ms).
The only problem I have now is that opening or closing a flash application causes an XRUN (dropout). This was also the case with the real-time kernel.
I tried out the proposed kernel after being referred here from https:/ /bugs.launchpad .net/ubuntu/ +source/ pulseaudio/ +bug/367671 which has a more accurate description of my problem: pulseaudio getting killed after ~20 minutes with a custom -rt kernel.
Anyway, so far installing the proposed generic kernel and making the edits to defaults.conf has stopped this behaviour and I'm able to listen to full albums without pulseaudio dying.
In fact, I'm reasonably surprised at how well this generic kernel handles my firewire interface with minimum xruns in jack with pretty good latency (<10ms).
The only problem I have now is that opening or closing a flash application causes an XRUN (dropout). This was also the case with the real-time kernel.