audio problems

[david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org (David Kramer)]

dan moylan wrote:
> matthew gillen wrote:
>> dan moylan wrote:
>>> is there any way for me to test the audio system independent
>>> of my current ubuntu installation, perhaps booting from a
>>> cdrom?  or indeed any other suggestions?  tia.
>> You could try some of the stuff here:
>> http://www.linux-sound.org/distro.html
> 
> voila!  downloaded APODIO 4.3.9, burned it to a disk, booted
> from the disk, and lo and behold play played my audio file.
> so the hardware's good (marathon was right), but i have no
> idea how to procede in getting my regular ubuntu 8.10 system
> to process audio.  i've tried everything i could think of.

I'm sorry I wasn't monitoring this thread, so excuse me if you've been
through this.  When I have sound problems with Ubuntu, it's always been
pulseaudio.  I kill it and restart it and I have sound again.

Oh, except once, for some reason a firefox video plugin dug its roots
into the sound system and wouldn't let anything else play until I
rebooted.  I found the culprit with lsof.