I love Debian and prefer to use it over Ubuntu, but one of the main things that keeps driving me back to Ubuntu is audio problems in Debian. Or… at least I’ve always assumed it’s a Debian problem. You start up the machine and audio works great. At some point you realize the audio has stopped working. Nothing works — system sounds, TweetDeck notifications, VLC… I think the problem actually stems from the Flash plugin though. Any time I view a video clip in my browser’s Flash plugin, the plugin seems to “grab” control of the sound server and doesn’t let go – even after I kill the clip, close the tab, even quit the browser.
Restarting the sound server seems to do the trick though. You will need to run this command as root and *warning* – it will crash the Flash plugin. So don’t restart sound in the middle of your favorite YouTube vid.
# alsa force-reload