Audio was one of the weakest points of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, with the PulseAudio ‘upgrade’ seeming to cause more problems then it fixed. One of the constant bugbears on my system was that when more then one application producing an audio stream – say, Firefox open to a YouTube video and VLC – were open simultaneously, audio would often cut out altogether and require a reboot to restore it. I tried out psyke83’s how-to which adds tweaked PulseAudio, ALSA and Flash packages backported from the upcoming Intrepid Ibex 8.10 release. It worked great and I havn’t had a single audio (or Flash for that matter) glitch since! Props to psyke83.