Yesterday Pulse/Alsa stopped working. There was no warning or unusual event that could have caused it. Worked fine before, suddenly it doesn't.

When I try to play a track with the Parole Media player, the Pulse audio controls show (under "playback" and under "output devices" the moving bars indicate that something is playing, but it doesn't come out of the PC. Same with Audacity.

Trying to play a track with Audacious only works via "Sndio Output" and without volume adjust - I can hear it then, so it's not the soundcard's fault. But nothing happens when I choose a different output plugin. Same with both players.

When I tried starting the ffado-mixer I got the following error message:
"logginghandler: Could not communicate with the FFADO DBus service..."


I suck at system maintainance and understand next to nothing of programming and linux architecture (hence my username). Please help me! What can I do to regain Pulse Audio control and normal usage of the audio function?