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It seems that Chrome (and its Flash component) has grabbed all the audio on the machine for itself, leaving no sound for any other applications. I am running KDE with PulseAudio. Is there a way in the myriad different applications* that handle sound on Linux to convince Chrome to give up its death grip on audio so that other applications can get a chance to make noise?

*- Looked at alsamixer, kmixer and Phonon (KDE multimedia configurer). Settings are a-ok, no indication that one application has hogged the audio device.

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1 Answer

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If you install the ALSA driver for PulseAudio then it will redirect ALSA audio through PulseAudio instead of hogging the ALSA device directly.

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This site rocks! The only question is how does one install the driver? A search shows that if your system installs the driver, you can add it with a stanza in /etc/asound.conf. Is this correct? – casualunixer Jun 25 '12 at 1:42
I just do yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, no config required here. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jun 25 '12 at 1:47
I'm looking at Ubuntu, which includes the drivers with another package. Arch is like RedHat, in that it has a separate package that autoconfigures the conf file. – casualunixer Jun 26 '12 at 1:03
I accept the answer on the basis that it works on RedHat and clones, though not Ubuntu. – casualunixer Sep 29 '12 at 17:27

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