Reset sound in Ubuntu (Linux) without restarting

When messing around with lousy audio players like Amarok2, it sometimes happens that your sound system gets usurped by them when they crash (and boy do they ever crash a lot!).

The first thing to try is:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

But that doesn’t always work, so you should see who’s holding on to who’s holding on to your sound system:

$ lsof | grep pcm

kill the processes that still have open files one at a time until you get your sound back.

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