This has to be one of those problems with an overly simple solution, but it escapes me atm. I first noticed it with xmms, playing music, of any sort, it will play fine for a while, then will stop, as if waiting to fill up a buffer, but never starts back again, it also continues to display the play symbol but no time advancement. I've narrowed it down to being an alsa problem, because when I run aplay somesound.wav, aplay never exits, and the sound loops indefinitely.