Ubuntu Sound Problem

While I have had a lot of luck and positive experiences with Linux as opposed to the most popular OS in the market place, there are issues that make Linux...less than perfect.

I have a recurring issue on my workstation where it just loses sound for no apparent reason. I don't know if it's tied into using Flash from websites, but it's through that that I tend to notice it (for example, Youtube suddenly plays videos without any sound). This is an issue that I can't imagine your average home user having the patience to deal with.

Then again, I'm not a patient person.

The solution I managed to find online without having to restart the computer (although, I admit, I don't remember if just logging out and back in fixes it or not...but that's annoying too) involved the following steps:

sudo killall pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload

I also made sure that I exited from Firefox and killed any instances of Firefox that were still running in the background. For some reason there seemed to be a ghost of Firefox in the process list and if something was still running attached ot the sound control processes then it would not reset properly. The first time I tried this solution it didn't work; I found an invisible Firefox running, killed it, and retried it then launched Firefox and the Youtube videos had sound restored.

Weird. And very, very annoying.