This is a pretty crazy - and annoying - problem. With some applications, usually games, my volume will start to fluctuate rapidly and randomly all on its own after about a dozen seconds spent running the program. This has happened on Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 13.04, all fresh installs. And the weird thing is I can't find any connection between the applications. Katawa Shoujo, Starsector, some WINE games. Flash stuff seems fine, in and out of the browser. I think music players like Cinnamon, Banshee and Rhythmbox are okay; I haven't seen any problems with those.
There must be some shared library, or more likely audio driver problems, causing this problem. It doesn't happen on Windows 7, so I don't think it's hardware. I'm just at a total loss as to how I should fix this, or what the problem could be.
lshw shows my audio device as "5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio"
