Ubuntu – Audio stopped working suddenly in 12.04

My audio is no longer working in Xubuntu 12.04 after working fine for about a year. This happened right after visiting the following website and installing an audio browser application to upload voice samples for the creation of an open-source speech recognition program: http://www.voxforge.org/home/read

I do not know if that is what caused the problem, but audio stopped working around the same time I installed this web application.

When I type in the terminal

pulseaudio -D

I get the following:

E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.

I tried the following next:

sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio

When I type 'pulseaudio' at the command prompt, I get:

E: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.