[CentOS] Reset audio controller w/o rebooting?

[Bart Schaefer]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:27 AM, JohnS <jses27 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You do not have to reboot the machine every time it happens! Use the
> System Monitor Gnome Applet to kill what ever is using it.

Unfortunately that doesn't help.  Once the machine is in this state,
then even after using "lsof" to track down all processes that are
using the sound device, and killing all of them, the *next* thing to
access the sound will play for a few seconds and then lock up.

I once got it to clear up by unloading and reloading all the
sound-related kernel modules, but that doesn't repeatably work either.