Some strange anomalies were occuring in my audio systems, namely, volume fluctuations during playback. Attempted to access sound in preferences, had disabled pulseaudio a while back with no ill effects, (weeks back), I couldn't access the menu Item. I was instructed that pulseaudio not running may be the issue, so attempted to launch that and came upon this worrying error message,

E: alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_avail_delay() returned strange values: delay 0 is less than avail 16. E: alsa-util.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_hda_intel'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers. E: alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_dump(): E: alsa-util.c: Soft volume PCM E: alsa-util.c: Control: PCM Playback Volume E: alsa-util.c: min_dB: -51 E: alsa-util.c: max_dB: 0 E: alsa-util.c: resolution: 256 E: alsa-util.c: Its setup is: E: alsa-util.c: stream : CAPTURE E: alsa-util.c: access : MMAP_INTERLEAVED E: alsa-util.c: format : S16_LE E: alsa-util.c: subformat : STD E: alsa-util.c: channels : 2 E: alsa-util.c: rate : 44100 E: alsa-util.c: exact rate : 44100 (44100/1) E: alsa-util.c: msbits : 16 E: alsa-util.c: buffer_size : 88192 E: alsa-util.c: period_size : 44096 E: alsa-util.c: period_time : 999909 E: alsa-util.c: tstamp_mode : ENABLE E: alsa-util.c: period_step : 1 E: alsa-util.c: avail_min : 87310 E: alsa-util.c: period_event : 0 E: alsa-util.c: start_threshold : -1 E: alsa-util.c: stop_threshold : 6205960286516543488 E: alsa-util.c: silence_threshold: 0 E: alsa-util.c: silence_size : 0 E: alsa-util.c: boundary : 6205960286516543488 E: alsa-util.c: Slave: Hardware PCM card 0 'HDA Intel' device 0 subdevice 0 E: alsa-util.c: Its setup is: E: alsa-util.c: stream : CAPTURE E: alsa-util.c: access : MMAP_INTERLEAVED E: alsa-util.c: format : S16_LE E: alsa-util.c: subformat : STD E: alsa-util.c: channels : 2 E: alsa-util.c: rate : 44100 E: alsa-util.c: exact rate : 44100 (44100/1) E: alsa-util.c: msbits : 16 E: alsa-util.c: buffer_size : 88192 E: alsa-util.c: period_size : 44096 E: alsa-util.c: period_time : 999909 E: alsa-util.c: tstamp_mode : ENABLE E: alsa-util.c: period_step : 1 E: alsa-util.c: avail_min : 87310 E: alsa-util.c: period_event : 0 E: alsa-util.c: start_threshold : -1 E: alsa-util.c: stop_threshold : 6205960286516543488 E: alsa-util.c: silence_threshold: 0 E: alsa-util.c: silence_size : 0 E: alsa-util.c: boundary : 6205960286516543488 E: alsa-util.c: appl_ptr : 87328 E: alsa-util.c: hw_ptr : 87328

If you need any system information, please feel free to ask. I'm not subscribed to the mailing list, as a note, so responses need to be cc'd directly to me if I am to get them. Thanks for any help you can give me,

Best, Kieran Brantner-Magee

(the system is ubuntu 10.10 kernel 2.6.35-23 )