v4.7.4
I lost my sound.
I get the startup and shutdown sounds but nothing in between.

I use Gentoo and I recompiled the whole system but that didn't help.

I don't see any errors with dmesg.

Is there a command line way to restart the sound system?

What notifications or sounds are you referring to?
If this is music or otherwise, you may wish to check that the needed codecs are installed.

Also, does your system use Pulseaudio?

bcooksley wrote:What notifications or sounds are you referring to?
If this is music or otherwise, you may wish to check that the needed codecs are installed.

Also, does your system use Pulseaudio?

It is all sounds.
The only thing that works is VLC which uses direct S/PDIF I guess.

Please check in System Settings > Multimedia > Phonon > Backends to see which Phonon backend is in use.

GStreamer

Can you check to see if your system is using Pulseaudio?
The easiest way to check this is by using "System Activity" (accessible via KRunner - also known as System Monitor) to see if a process called "pulseaudio" is running.

Unless you explicitly installed PulseAudio, you are using ALSA. Have you done any sound configuration there? If I'm not mistaken, the default installation does not use dmix and therefore only allows one sound stream at a time.