Hello all,
I experienced a few times a wired thing with my sound system and I wanna know if you encountered the same thing.
I use frequently VLC as an audio player and even when the music is stopped the application is running. But sometimes when I open a youtube link it cannot play the sound. The only workaround I found is to close VLC and restart firefox and after that I can view and listen the video.
Linux is known to be unfriendly for multiple sound applications playing audio from more than one sound device at the same time.
Sometimes a Linux application will seize the audio device and not let go (ie not share it, so that other applications can not use the sound device).
For some hardware using the ALSA api in the multimedia applications and in the desktop will solve this. In some hardware it will not.
Pulse audio is supposed to help address this, but the introduction of pulse audio has not been very smooth.
Thank you!