On Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (or 16.04? I do not remember because it was a long time ago), running alsa apps was freezing any sound in Chrome and other apps which used pulseaudio. jackd was silent with pulseaudio, when switched to alsa worked, but pulseaudio apps worked no more. I am not sure if stopping jack was bringing pulseaudio back, possibly. The card was old and I though that it might be its drivers.
Then I changed the system to Ubuntu 20.04 and the card to Soundblaster Z. It works very well until I run fluidsynth. Using that app with alsa causes problems with pulseaudio instantly. Using fluidsynth with pulseaudio works typically up to few hours. Then the effects are as follows: frozed sound in Chrome ("please restart device"), alsamixer starts for about a minute, then is unusable. I need to restart the X server to have sound again. Given these problems, I did not even try to run jackd in the new system.
I also occasionally use these two commands:
pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=150
pactl unload-module module-loopback
Both the previous and the current card have also an analog and a digital mode, which I toggle sometimes. I do not know if it has anything to do, but in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (?) I did not use pactl at all and there were problems anyway. Any solution?
