So, how would you phrase this bug report?

[mutesolo]

Last week, I was playing around with audio recording in Ardour (a great audio app) when my sound card started acting reeeeally weird. JACK died, and I couldn't restart. In fact, *no* audio worked. Any app that wrote to the sound card would just hang indefinitely

Comments

[jaaron]

Probably a kernel bug (but could be flaky hardware).
After googling around to see if anyone else has the same issue, I'd first try to confirm that I can reproduce it, then post to the distro's bugtracker. Include kernel & userspace audio version info, detailed hardware info, steps to reproduce, and anything from /var/log/messages that looks related.
-a

[mutesolo]

Aaron,

Thanks for the pointer. It's good to hear from a bona fide kernel hacker that could indeed be either hardware *or* kernel.

I didn't mention in the article, but I've found some good stuff on Google for people seeing a similar (but actually much milder) problem with the card I use, which does indicate it's a kernel/drivers issue.

Interestingly, I'm not sure how reproducible it is - I won't know unless I reproduce it (which, admittedly, I'm less-than-eager to do, since I *use* this sound card all the time!)

[jaaron]

well, if you can't reproduce you should still try to post about it (especially if there is an open bug report on your distro's tracker). Reproducing is of course much better, but the more people who report that they are affected the more likely it is to be addressed.