Fix no sound in Adobe Flash on Linux under Firefox, Chromium, Opera et al.

After moving to Ubuntu 11.10 I have been experiencing issues with Adobe Flash not playing sound at all through any brower on this PulseAudio equipped operating system. PulseAudio is a sound server which accepts sound input from one or more sources and redirects it to one or more sinks (E.g. sound cards). One of the goals of PulseAudio is to reroute all sound streams through it; common issues include programs locking the ALSA sound device which then prevents other applications from mixing and using the audio device. To correct the issue I experienced with Opera and Flash I followed the following method which routes ALSA apps directly through pulse:



First create a global ALSA config file:
sudo touch /etc/asound.conf


Edit the blank config file:
sudo gedit /etc/asound.conf


Copy/paste these lines into the config file:


pcm.pulse { type pulse }
ctl.pulse { type pulse }
pcm.!default { type pulse }
ctl.!default { type pulse }


Save and exit.


Now time to kill pulseaudio, it will automatically restart:



sudo killall pulseaudio


And finally restart the browser, audio sound should now route correctly.