I've been waiting to post about this issue for quite some time, nbut when I finally saw this thread I decided it was time to pipe up. I had lots of issues with my soundsystem dying in squeeze whether I used alsa or pulse. Only a reboot would fix it. It seemed to creep up most commonly when nultiple sound aps were in use on one desktop login (those being run by multiple users never caused this). For instance, a youtube video in chrome would, if virtualbox, rhythmbox, or another application tried to work with sound, I'd get nothing till reboot.
Since my upgrade to wheezy, new issues have arisen. Primarily that of VLC's (yeah I know I'm starting a war now) sound output would be massively infused with static until audio would, at some point, spike in a certain equalizer freq range (I suspect), and sound would then be perfect until a pausing of playback, or switch to different media. This turned out to resolve as soon as I ditched VLC for the stock media player. Unfortunately, just a couple of days after finding that fix, the entire system, at what appears to be a kernel level, now refuses at admit that I have sound hardware at ALL. Dmesg scanning confirms that it's not finding crap and the gnome control panel only shows 'dummy sound system' as available for [non-functional] output, compared to the 3 devices total that I had a few days ago. Haven't checked to see what the BIOS menu says yet, but I will as soon as I can take the machine down for a bit.
-Damon
> From: Gary Roach <gary719_list1@verizon.net>
> To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Sound problems on Wheezy upgrade
[Snip]
> On 09/20/2013 08:40 PM, drew craig wrote:
> > I ran into an alsa issue awhile back and solved it by altering the conf file. May or may not be of any help. I wrote it up here
> >
> > http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=409
> >
> >
> I hope I am not hyjacking this thread but, while my problem seems to be
> somewhat different, it still started with a wheezy upgrade that killed
> my sound system. I don't think that any one has identified the root
> cause of this problem and are kind of using a shot gun approach to the
> problem solving. So let me get as specific as I can. Running as root
> 'service alsa-utils restart' produced the following return:
> root@mysystem:/etc# service alsa-utils restart
> [ ok ] Shutting down ALSA...done.
> [....] Setting up ALSA...warning: 'alsactl restore' failed with
> error message 'Home directory /root not ours.'...Home
> directory /root not ours....
> Can anyone explain this error message and suggest a fix.
>
> I hope my above statement doesn't insult anyone. I know a lot of effort
> has gone into this thread. But my observation still stands. I'm finding
> references to this problem all over google but no reasonable solutions.
> I can't believe that there are more than one or two actual problems
> here. Programs just don't usually break in multiple ways all at the same
> time.
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