I'm running my main system on 1.6 (proper).

Once in a great while, I've had the audio cut out.  When it does so, it
usually goes out with a screech of static, then XMMS will freeze.  Trying
to run ogg123 gets a lockup that I can't break even with "kill -9".
The /dev/audio note, though, will have its datestamp updated when I try
to use, e.g., XMMS.

Now, the weird thing is: It comes back if I exit XFree86 and restart it.

I've tried killing everything except the controlling xterm process (which,
when it dies, terminates the X server, requiring a fress "startx" command
to restart).  (The session-controlling xterm is kept iconified and has a
red background to distinguish it.  I know that I never run anything in
it.)

Nothing works.


Hm.  I guess the ONE other X related process is twm.  I forgot that that
was still running.

Since I can't reproduce the killed audio at will, I don't know if it might
be a window manager issue, but I thought that I'd ask if this problem
sounds familiar to anyone.


Other incidental information:

The motherboard is a VIA-based system (the CPU is an Athlon).

Somtimes, if there's heavy activity, audio can get a little scrambled.
This hangs around for a while, and has on occasion accumulated---though
certain things will clear the scrambling.  (Left to itself, I think
that XMMS reinitializes itself eventually, perhaps at the end of an
Ogg Vorbis track.)

This doesn't happen often.

Most of the time, playback works well.  (Though I've never been able
to get it to record satisfactorily.  It seems that the record gain
is fixed to some low value and it has to be ramped up by post-processing
to be audible.

When the audio dies, dmesg/xconsole have nothing particularly
informative in them.  There are "auvia0: codec invalid" messages,
which appear to mostly appear one per one per track that XMMS starts
to playback---but the messages don't seem to be associated with any
discernible playback problems.


Well, I thought that I'd at least post and see if anyone else has
similar experiences.  Maybe they can offer some insight, or maybe the
above will tell them something new---or maybe we can just comiserate.
(^&


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/