How to Restart ALSA Sound Driver in Linux

Restarting Advanced Linux Sound Architecture

This quick guide will show you how to restart your ALSA sound driver. There are many reasons you may need to do this. Most likely your sound has stopped working or become crackly. This may or may not be the solution to your problem, but it certainly won't hurt.

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Restarting ALSA is extremely simple. Follow these steps:

Open a terminal and become root or sudo root.

Type "su" and press enter. Next, enter your root password (Not necessarily your user login password).
If you're running Ubuntu, you may instead type "sudo " in front of each command below. You will be asked to enter your password the first time.

Type: "/etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop" and press Enter.
Type: "alsa force-reload" and press Enter.
Type: "/etc/init.d/alsa-utils start" and press Enter.

If you get a dialog box asking if you would like to reload something that was shut down with ALSA, select "yes." Close the terminal now as you don't want to stay root.

You are all finished now. Wasn't that simple.

If that didn't fix your problem, you might be using a different sound driver (Like OSS or PulseAudio). Try changing your sound driver in your OS sound settings and seeing if another driver works instead. Also, make sure in your volume control options that both your Master and any other options (Like PCM) are all on and high.