For the last month or so, Pulseaudio has been crashing for me. It seems to happen only when I use certain apps, such as watching video with VLC,
or watching embedded videos in Firefox. It does not happen when listening to audio through an audio player, or having Zoom calls. After a crash,
the Pulseaudio Volume Control will give a "connecting to Pulseaudio" error. Restarting with either "pulseaudio --start" or "pulseaudio -k" will hang for
10-20 seconds, and then "work", in that "ps" will show Pulse is running, but I still can't play music (through anything), and the volume app shows the
same error. This will last a few minutes, until sound starts again.
This was on Bullseye; I recently upgraded to Bookworm (for other reasons, though I hoped it would help with this), and it's still happening, although
now "pulseaudio --start" will respond almost instantly. However, it still takes a few minutes for sound to come back.
Where do I look for help on this? /var/log/messages shows warnings about a deprecated module, but nothing more serious than that. I'm not sure where
these crashes might be recorded, or what else to do. But having sound is very important to me, so I'd love to fix this!