For me the problem was arecord holding open the snd device, this was because of the randomsound init script kicking it off to generate entropy. try lsof | grep snd, and see anything is opening those devices directly. Confirm, first of all with pulseaudio -vv.
For me the problem was arecord holding open the snd device, this was because of the randomsound init script kicking it off to generate entropy. try lsof | grep snd, and see anything is opening those devices directly. Confirm, first of all with pulseaudio -vv.