sound stops working for everything but KDE at (random) times

jdratlif

Every once in awhile, my sound will stop working in everything but KDE (or possibly phonon -- not quite sure). To be more precise, I can open the multimedia panel, go to phonon, and test my alsa output devices and I get sound just fine. But I cannot get sound from browsers (firefox or chromium) or media players (mplayer or vlc).

Sound does not start out broken (i.e. it works everywhere when I first boot up), and I cannot reliably reproduce the problem. I have no idea even what to look for. I cannot fix the problem by logging out/logging back in, or by killing every process running under my user.

I am only using alsa, with drivers compiled into the kernel. I have built-in Intel HD audio (RealTek codec).

Any thoughts on what I should look for? I was using the 3.7.10 kernel. I just built the 3.8.10 one and am running that now, but I have had this problem on earlier kernel versions (no, I cannot remember specific versions, but I'm pretty sure 3.6 affected me as well).
_________________
CODEpendent blog - http://jdrrant.blogspot.com/

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 7:29 pm Post subject:

Are you using pulseaudio and making sure everything is set up for pulseaudio?

There are a bunch of threads about pulseaudio... and its benefits and evils...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

jdratlif · Posted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 9:07 pm Post subject:

No, I am only using alsa. No pulse, jack, esd, or oss.
_________________
CODEpendent blog - http://jdrrant.blogspot.com/