I've often faced this problem that the sound suddenly stops working, and after a reboot things are fine as before. By sound I mean Audacious, that's what I normally use.
It was irritating to reboot just to get my headphones working!!
The error it reports is: "Cannot connect to output".
The output drop-down field in Preferences->Audio shows '"Pulseaudio Output Plugin" and changing it to "Alsa output" solved the problem.
But why it changed? What was the default output before?
Does it happen with other players? other flavors of linux?
I'll update this as and when I get the answers :P
