Sound problem in Kubuntu 13.10

Question

I have a sound problem on Kubuntu 13.10 which I find rather annoying. The problem comes in two stages.

By default, I cannot listen to skype. So, following a suggestion similar to this one, I added the usual tsched=0 to the line

  load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

in the file /etc/pulse/default.pa. At this point, skype started working well. But this broke the audio on my Netflix connection (through Wine & Firefox), which worked flawlessly earlier on. I quickly discovered that, getting rid of the tsched=0 addition, restored a correct sound on Netlfix (via Wine-> Firefox), but again compromised the audio on skype.

In the end, I have a major and a minor question.

1. Are there settings that accommodate both skype and Netflix?
2. If the answer to the previous question is no, is there at least a way, complex though it may be, to restart PulseAudio without rebooting the pc?

Answer 1

I have found a solution to my question number two, i.e. how to switch from one configuration for pulseaudio to another without rebooting the pc.

1) Comment out the following line in /etc/pulse/default.pa

  load-module module-udev-detect 

2) The following two commands will restart pulseaudio with or without (respectively) the tsched=0 option:

  pulseaudio --kill &&  pulseaudio --start --load="module-udev-detect tsched=0"
  pulseaudio --kill &&  pulseaudio --start --load="module-udev-detect"

The reason for commenting out the line above is that, when restarting pulseaudio, the command pulseaudio --start reads both the command line option and the configuration file, where it will find a conflicting prescription for module-udev-detect in the case of the first command, which will then fail with error message

  E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.

Commenting out the line above prevents this error. All of this can be easily scripted, and one of the two commands above (in my case, the second one) can be inserted into /etc/rc.local, so that after boot, a fully working configuration for pulseaudio is in place.