Comment 37 for bug 76876

I can confirm very similar problems...except I'm not using OSS at all, and I still have the same issue with ALSA apps. Used to build my own kernels and found this issue any time OSS emulation was enabled with ALSA....not sure what brainiac decided that OSS emulation should be turned on in the ubuntu kernel but it's obviously causing huge numbers of problems, frequently making the sound system totally unusable, and for no apparent good reason.

Although ALSA apps shouldn't be behaving like I've seen ever...not with my sound hardware, and not with Linux...make me strongly suspect that some Ubuntu developer had the brilliant idea of hacking ALSA, and somehow opened Pandora's box. As of today I'm building a Gentoo kernel for this system and ditching this ridiculous mess that Ubuntu has created....three weeks of trying to fix ALSA so that it does what it was designed to do is just too much for me...someone who have been creating distributions from scratch since 2001.