Sound issues

At first I thought my sound card and drivers were working fine, but now I'm noticing that the sound will periodically just cut out and cease to work.

For example, I could be playing a game and after I exit the game, my sound no longer works untill I restart. Or I could boot up and have sound but then start a game just to find out the sound isn't working.

It seams to be very inconsistent.

On another note, as of yesterday UT2004 will crash to my desktop usually within 1 - 3 minutes after starting it.

You will need to give us a bit more information to be able to help-
What distro?
What soundcard?
What drivers and are they built into the kernel or running as modules?

Linux does have some sound issues, and I find them most noticeable when gaming.
I now use exclusively emu10k1 based sound cards because they are the ones I have had the fewest problems with.

Kernel: 2.6.11
Distro: Suse Pro 9.3
Sound Card: Asus P4P800-SE On-board
Not sure what drivers are being used. It was auto detected durring instalation.

Not sure just how much help I can be-
I haven't messed with SuSe much, and not familiar with that board at all.

2.6 Linux uses ALSA for sound, and the drivers CAN be built into the kernel. Normally they are run as modules though (easier to start and stop without rebooting.)

If you run lsmod in a console you will see all the currently loaded modules, and somewhere in there should be some like mine, below:
snd_seq_midi
snd_emu10k1_synth
snd_emux_synth
snd_seq_virmidi
snd_seq_midi_emul
snd_emu10k1
snd_rawmidi
snd_util_mem
snd_hwdep

Mine are for an SB Live! card with emu10k1 chip and driver.

If you can figure out just which modules are in use it could help us to straighten it out...

BUT- my best advice, taken from my experience, is to shut off the onboard and get an emu10k1 card.

I know there are some folks who are pretty good with SuSe here- hopefully one of them will show up and help out soon. (There may be sound quirks in SuSe I don't now about.)
If not, I'll check back and see if I can help again.

Here are mine.

snd_pcm_oss
snd_mixer_oss
snd_intel8x0
snd_ac97_codec
snd_pcm
snd_timer
snd
soundcore
snd_page_alloc

Thanks for the help.

Any luck with this man?

I've been kinda busy this week getting stuff ready for a shindig this weekend, and that will continue.

But if your are still having troubles I will try and help.
(I'll be more available NEXT week though. )

Lemme guess,using KDE.... Artsd hanging up. Instead of "rebooting" ps aux and kill the pid artsd is running as.

I'm using Gnome 2.10, and no, the problem is not fixed yet. It's not a very serious bug. The sound cuts in and out from time to time. I think it either has something to do with two programs trying to access the soundcard simultaneously, or a unstable/crashing program which has control of it. (I've noticed this mainly with games, especially windows games running in cedega)

I'll look into it some more.

Even though alsa is built into kernels now, i would get the latest from the Alsa Project and install it... Perhaps a newer module has been released for your hardware. When the sound "hangs" ps aux and see if artsd is running, so we can rule that out... I hate arts