Lost Sound when Plugging in USB flash

I was playing an .avi in kaffeine, and at the same time I plugged in a 512MB USB flash drive. Immediately I lost sound in Kaffeine, though video was still playing. I check Youtube via Firefox, same thing.

I used to have a problem in Amarok where if Amarok crashed, it would mute the sound without my noticing. Thankfully I remembered to check this in Kaffeine, but that was not the problem.

I don't mess with the sound settings often, so I had a fun time trying to find them (turns out they're not in your system or settings menu... try looking for KMix in the Multimedia menu instead.)

I log on to the freenode IRC channel #kubuntu, and a couple nice folks there had some suggestions for me.

I was told to pay special attention to KMix lines: master, master mono, PCM. These were all fine (at or near the top).

(You can also open alsamixer via the command line)

alsamixer

I was then advised to restart ALSA.

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

This did not work. I tried closing all my programs which might be using sound, and running the command again. This did not work either.

I ran the command, and then rebooted. This works! Now I have my sound back.

Sometimes no audio in Firefox pages with Flash

After having my system up and running for a while, I noticed that if I use Amarok and then open Firefox, videos in YouTube would have no sound. I figured this was just a wonky Kubuntu feature until I decided to actually research the problem.

This problem was solved if I would reboot the system and open Firefox and watch videos first (before playing music). The problem still was recurring, though.

Apparently this is more than an ALSA sound driver fight between Firefox and Amarok. It's actually a bug (see link).

How to fix your Firefox audio: open a terminal/console, and type

cd /tmp
mkdir /tmp/.esd
ln -s /tmp/.esd-1000/socket /tmp/.esd/socket