My streaming machines all have Pulse Audio disabled since it is an unnecessary extra layer of complication. I presume the reboot issues you are having relate to increasing the size of the kernel asound prealloc buffer? If so, I solved that problem by having a small script executed at startup as follows:
#!/bin/sh PCM_ID="/proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/prealloc" LOGFILE="/home/username/prealloc.status" BUFSIZE="1024"
if [ -f $LOGFILE ]; then rm $LOGFILE fi
# Adjust playback buffer if [ -f $PCM_ID ]; then echo "Success: $PCM_ID ($BUFSIZE)" > $LOGFILE echo $BUFSIZE > $PCM_ID else echo "Failure: $PCM_ID ($BUFSIZE)" > $LOGFILE fi
Obviously you are going to need to edit the LOGFILE destination, but I find it works pretty well when called from /etc/rc.local