Sound unreliable after upgrade to 9.10

[ghormley]

I started with Ubuntu at 7.04 and have upgraded slowly to 9.10. Boy am I ever sorry I did that!

When I boot my machine, the sound works great, for a while. I tend to leave my PC up and running 24/7. A few hours after booting, the sound goes haywire. At that point, YouTube links don't play sound, though frequently the video is good; streaming audio links become totally useless; I cannot get any Internet audio link to work. Sometimes, the audio of a video stored on the hard drive will work, but other times not. This has been going on for a couple of months and I'm really frustrated with Ubuntu's 9.10. 8.04 worked so well!

I running on a Dell GX-280 box with 3gig RAM. I did not do a fresh install of 9.10 as I read I should do, but rather did the upgrade to 9.04 and then to 9.10.

The really frustrating part is that if I reboot, everything works well for a time! But, given Linux is known for it's reliability, this problem should not be present. One would expect this of Windows, but XP was much more stable in this area than 9.10 is right now on my box.

I'm relatively new to Linux, though not to PCs, but I have no clue where to start or how to proceed. I did try to run the Comprehensive Guide but the link in Step 3 appears to be broken, so nothing there.

I'd appreciate some hand holding for this ticked off 63 year old!

[susanw]

Hello,

I just tried this tutorial

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578&highlight=pulseaudio

and it seems to have cleaned up the sound on my computer nicely. (I'm running on Karmic and had sound issues after running the PC for a while plus muted audio on startup and distorted login music.) I found that I needed to logout and login again before Step 5 could be completed. If you try it do not be put off by several of the steps not removing packages/error messages saying you did not have files in the first place (as it says in the tutorial this does not matter.)

Sorry if it's the tutorial you were talking about before, I couldn't be sure.

Susan

[ghormley]

Did all that shortly after you posted your note, Susan. Then everything worked well. Now, the PC has been on since and the same streaming video file won't play properly. It's like the voices have a bad, bad, stuttering problem.

Furthermore, now I get no audio from my CD/DVD drives when I try to play an audio CD.

Also, the login sound is hosed. It's like the orchestra looses its sense of timing several times in the short performance. Not just skips but the looses the beat.

Thanks for your help, but as usual, it didn't fix the problem with 9.10 for very long. Cannot imagine what can be changing as I've done nothing to the box since I went through that entire procedure.

I'm so ticked right now, I'm thinking about dumping Ubuntu for something else. I'll wait a while, however, to see if anyone can come up with another idea.

John

[ghormley]

While whatever was supposed to open the audio CD did not, when I launched Gnome MPlayer, it played the CD just fine. Maybe there are more than one problems related to sound here.

The 'whatever' was Rhythmbox Music Player. Seems like there a ton of players in Linux and most are not very versatile or complete.

[ghormley]

Am I the only person having trouble with sound under 9.10?

[yddet12]

Am I the only person having trouble with sound under 9.10?

Nope, but I have a different problem. Everything plays, but slightly too fast.