Restart Sound Daemon?

gymnart · 04-22-2008, 12:20 PM

Yesterday (4/21/08) I was trying out a radio stream (it did not work) and for some reason, after that, when I went to play music in Amarok and then XMMS, the sound no longer worked. I had to restart my computer (turn completely off then back on) to get the sound back. My guess is that the stream, which did not work, had "hijacked" my sound.

How can I restart the sound without having to shut down the computer then turning it back on?

atheist · 04-22-2008, 12:30 PM

I've had the same problem... Except that it was enough for me to restart the X server. Would love to get a solution, since it's really annoying having to exit X every few weeks.

tredegar · 04-22-2008, 01:23 PM

For debian (and the ?buntu's) you can restart the sound system with

/etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

It'll be something similar for Suse, and you'll need to be root.

gymnart · 04-22-2008, 01:42 PM

I looked in the /etc/init.d directory and the only thing I found that was alsa related was, "alsasound"

So would it be, "/etc/init.d/alsasound restart"? (without the quotes of course).

tredegar · 04-22-2008, 01:45 PM

Quote:

So would it be, "/etc/init.d/alsasound restart"? (without the quotes of course).

You could give it a try, and see what happens

gymnart · 04-22-2008, 01:57 PM

I just did and it worked. Funny thing was that the icon for KMix was gone after that. So I restarted KMix.

Thanks much for your suggestion!

tredegar · 04-22-2008, 02:06 PM

Pleased it worked.
kmix probably disappeared as there was no sound system for it to mix. If you had logged out and back in again (not rebooted), it probably would have reappeared, but you fixed it anyway.

To prevent things grabbing audio and not letting go, I have a KDE setting in kcontrol -> Sound system -> General, that is titled "Auto-suspend". I set this to "Auto suspend if idle after 1 second", and these things do not happen.

gymnart · 04-23-2008, 11:35 AM

Thanks for that info!
Mine was set to 5 seconds. I reset it like you have yours.