Ubuntu sound

In my last post, I mentioned one recurring problem that was driving me crazy with my new Ubuntu Linux installation: sound mysteriously dropping. At the time it appeared to be a problem recognizing the hardware, but that got fixed when I made sure each user's account had explicitly selected the appropriate hardware. But there was still the problem of audio just not working and the user having to reboot.

I haven't had the problem in a while but my son has on his account, so naturally I thought he was (inadvertently) doing something to mess it up. But this morning, I got hit with it again and so got to investigate. I kept messing with my sound preferences, but that didn't do anything. Finally I noticed my wife's account still had an active firefox process running, so I switched to her account and killed it. As soon as the process died, the banshee player I had started on my account started playing. At night, if I've been on facebook or something, I don't typically kill my browser, and that's apparently what's been hosing up my son's account, forcing him to reboot regularly and irritating me.

So apparently the sound system doesn't handle multiple users accessing it at the same time, at least not well. The lesson is, when you're done with your session, make sure all your desktop processes have been killed so that other users on the machine aren't negatively impacted.