I'm having a problem with LIRC breaking audio on the OS scale after firing a command. For example, I'd do:
irsend send_once Samsung_BN59-01224C KEY_VOLUMEUP --count=5
and afterwards, play an audio file, and the program governing that file would seize up and not play any sound. Same goes for a script I've written that uses the pygame library for python.
What's worse is that LIRC also stops firing correctly after this bug occurs. I can see infrared light being shot out of the diode, but there might be something off with the timing.
This happens both ways, so, after playing an audio file, LIRC will stop working but further playing of audio is possible.
The following extremely rarely but sometimes I'm able to play audio after LIRC finishes a command, and the result is heavily pitched down version of the original sound that cuts out after around a second or so.
Tested with different remotes, same results occur. I'm not sure if the fix that a user proposed in this thread could cause this (https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/2993) but I'm putting it out there that I used it, since unmodified LIRC has problems with both the receiver and transmitter turned on in /boot/config.txt. The rest of my installation is standard.
Fixed this by reverting the fix I posted in the last paragraph. Apparently using PWM for Infrared causes issues with onboard audio on raspbian. I commented out the lines responsible for the receiver and left the gpio-ir-tx option uncommented. Works fine with just the transmitter on.