Soon after the following packages were updated (below) flash player wouldn't output any sound and vlc sound output under any of the outputs selected in the client was choppy and distorted at best.
List of updated packages thought to be the cause of this problem:
pulseaudio (0.9.12-0ubuntu1~ppa5) to 0.9.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2
pulseaudio-esound-compat (0.9.12-0ubuntu1~ppa5) to 0.9.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2
pulseaudio-module-gconf (0.9.12-0ubuntu1~ppa5) to 0.9.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2
pulseaudio-module-hal (0.9.12-0ubuntu1~ppa5) to 0.9.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2
pulseaudio-module-x11 (0.9.12-0ubuntu1~ppa5) to 0.9.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2
pulseaudio-module-zeroconf (0.9.12-0ubuntu1~ppa5) to 0.9.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2
pulseaudio-utils (0.9.12-0ubuntu1~ppa5) to 0.9.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2
Also when selecting "HDA-Intel ALC262 Analog (ALSA)" from "Sound preferences" and then clicking test the following message is displayed "audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open audio device for playback.", again this appears to be a result of the latest pulseaudio update!
After upgrading, flash sound only works when no other sound is playing. The npviewer.bin is not picked up by pulseaudio in etiher case, so I assume it's just using alsa. Here is the output in terminal without sound playing:
E: shm.c: Invalid shared memory segment size
And with sound playing:
E: shm.c: Invalid shared memory segment size
E: shm.c: Invalid shared memory segment size
ALSA lib ../../.
ALSA lib ../../.
One thing that I notice that is different between 0.9.10 and 0.9.12-0.9.13 is that system sound is picked up in the pulseaudio applet, even if I turn it off in Sound Preferences, so maybe this has something to do with libcanberra.