Web browser hooked pulseaudio sound, how to release? It seems that Chrome (and its Flash component) has grabbed all the audio on the machine for itself, leaving no sound for any other applications. I am running KDE with PulseAudio. Is there a way in the myriad different applications* that handle sound on Linux to convince Chrome to give up its death grip on audio so that other applications can get a chance to make noise? *- Looked at alsamixer, kmixer and Phonon (KDE multimedia configurer). Settings are a-ok, no indication that one application has hogged the audio device.

If you install the ALSA driver for PulseAudio then it will redirect ALSA audio through PulseAudio instead of hogging the ALSA device directly.