On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 04:43, technomage wrote:
> I've been getting this off and on with the later kernels.
> 
> is there anything I can do about it short of rebooting my machine to recover 
> sound?

I'm no sound expert, but I sometimes get badly behaved apps that lock
/dev/dsp and refuse to release it when they exit.  More precisely, the
bad app doesn't completely exit and some straggler process holds a lock
on /dev/dsp.

Specifically, I have seen this with ayttm-0.4.2-1 and older, as well as,
MPlayer 0.9 in some situations.

Anyway, the lsof command might shed some light on what app is using
/dev/dsp.


# lsof /dev/dsp
COMMAND    PID  USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE  NODE NAME
gmplayer 26649 kevin   11w   CHR   14,3      65363 /dev/dsp
#


...Kevin