I was quietly working on my computer when suddenly audio started playing. I hear Three Stooges, an ad for some movie, some sort of drama tv show, etc. Two possibly three streams of audio playing at the same time.

The odd thing is, i'm not running any media players or have any web pages playing audio or video. I do have several firefox and konqueror browsers up with multiple tabs. Checked them all, didn't see the cause.

Is there a tool that can query alsa and report where the audio is coming from - which apps are supplying it? If it is firefox, is there a plugin or command line tool to report streaming activity for every tab of every browser window that's up?

I'm running Arch linux 64-bit using alsa.

Are you sure it was your linux box? May be you have some ghosts? What about KDE or Gnome or some other progs?

Well my housemate did work at a funeral home last year...

It could very well be some kde or gnome (or other) app not visible. i'm using icewm and don't have all the eyecandy status bars , taskbars etc.

Ah, i have found the culprit. some web page i just closed, didn't appear to have any ads but i guess it did - closing it made the sound suddenly stop.

But now i am motivated to find or create some sorta tool to display what's feeding into the audio system... if i had such free time!

Just see whether u r playing a music by just placing mouse pointer for few seconds ..