[Steve A]

On XBMCbuntu everything was working fine, no software updated or installed when problem arose.

I was trying to get sound working when starting Chromium from Advanced Launcher. Problem seemed to start after running the audio mixer addon in XBMC. Initially noticed sound stopped working in Chromium (started after exiting XBMC), but on reboot XBMC no longer had sound either.

Found I was getting "Unable to open audio" error and followed instructions at in this thread

After deleting and recreating .asounrc as that thread advised sound now works in Chromium even when started by Advanced Launcher in XBMC.

BUT no sound in XBMC itself even if go straight into it from boot. I don't believe I've changed anything else.

Anyone have ideas what I should look for?

[Steve A]

Solved.

It seems the audio mixer add-on has a bug. It leaves the exclamation out of "pcm.!default" when it writes .asoundrc

I just put the exclamation back into the first line of the 'broken' file and all is well again. Except I still have no sound when starting Chromium from the advanced launcher. XBMC stops playing when I launch, why does it not let go in such a way Chromium will work?

[Steve A]

Turns out not all was well as trying to play a video with surround sound hung the machine in the video menu.

On further thinking and a bit of research I just deleted ~/.asoundrc and changed the XBMC audio settings to use "Defaults" instead of "Custom > plug:both".

Now I get all sound via spdif (which is all I want), proper surround pass through AND starting chromium-browser from Advanced Launcher has sound too which was my original problem.