2024-03-24

Laptop (Dell Latitude 7480) has recently started having annoying phases, with sound freezing so that e.g. mplayer or browser plugins just hang.  Killing all pulseaudio processes, sometimes twice, can get it ok again, but then only until a new access or a pause/resume of playing.  

Rather than rebooting or trying (in vain) to unload and reload kernel modules for audio, this https://superuser.com/questions/17312/restart-ubuntu-sound-processes-via-command-line adapted from an old (~2012) suggestion ( pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload ) seemed to do a good job:

# alsactl init 0

$ pulseaudio -k 


The second part we expect to be like "killall pulseaudio" (or with -9) which I was doing already. 
The first is the reset of hardware drivers, which was lacking. 


Addendum:  ok, .. it went pretty quickly back to badness. 

#  alsactl kill quit 
#  lsmod | grep ^snd | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs rmmod  -f  
#  alsactl init 0 

was perhaps more blessed ... we shall see.