Comment 13 for bug 366708

The problem I have observed is that after leaving an audio source "idle" for a while -- such as a Flash player in Firefox or even a VLC player that I had left paused overnight -- when I try to resume or play something again from the same process, all I get is silence. It's as if once Pulseaudio's "suspend-on-idle" feature kicks in and suspends audio for a process, it is permanent -- it doesn't seem to detect when that process again becomes an active audio source and does not "unsuspend" audio for it.

The only workaround I was able to come up with was to kill the process for which I couldn't hear any sound output. So for the Flash player, I think it might have worked to kill the npviewer.bin process spawned by firefox (from the command line) and then reload the page. But it's been a while since I've tried that, so I don't remember for sure if that works all the time. What I usually end up doing is just opening up another Firefox profile and opening the page with the Flash plugin in that separate process. That way I can restart that whole Firefox process without interrupting anything else I may be doing in my main Firefox profile. With VLC, of course, I just quit and restart VLC and navigate to wherever I left off.

Audio was working pretty much flawlessly for me in Jaunty. It has only been since I upgraded to Karmic (at alpha4) that I started having these problems. I had been hoping they would work themselves out on their own, but they haven't so I searched for a ticket. Hopefully this is the right one.

I'll have to try the "disabling suspend-on-idle" workaround...