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I am running Ubuntu 14.04 on an ASUS X52J laptop.

I was watching a lecture on Google Chrome, when suddenly, all sound was lost. Throughout the PC. No sounds from Chrome (even though Chrome indicates it does play sound). No sounds from VLC, and no sounds from pulseaudio's sound tests.

I've tried:

  • Restarting pulseaudio via pulseaudio --kill.
  • Reloading ALSA via alsa reload and alsa force-reload.
  • Checking the ALSA mixer via alsamixer, nothing out of the ordinary.
  • Restart my PC. Did not help, didn't even hear the drum sound on startup.
  • mved my ~/.config/pulse file away and killed pulseaudio again.
  • pacmd list-sinks | grep muted indicates that nothing is muted.

I'm not sure what to do anymore. Could this be a hardware problem? Is there anything I haven't tried yet?

Output of aplay -l:

madara@Madara-PC:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 0: CONEXANT Analog [CONEXANT Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
bain
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Madara's Ghost
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  • possible duplicate of Is there another way to restart the sound system if pulseaudio/ALSA don't work? – Panther May 07 '14 at 19:13
  • The commands given in the link are how you restart your sound (pulseaudio) without restarting. – Panther May 07 '14 at 19:14
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    @bodhi.zazen: Really? Have you read my question at all? None of the answers on that question [...] seemed to have done anything.A question is not a duplicate if it is not solved by the other question ;) – Madara's Ghost May 07 '14 at 19:18
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    Just because the commands did not work does not mean that 1. restarting your sound will fix the problem or 2. There are some alternate secret codes for you to try. The commands given to you in your link answer your question, but did not solve your prolbem. – Panther May 07 '14 at 19:20
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    @bodhi.zazen: That is correct. Hence, it is not a duplicate question. Think about it this way, from a 30k+ perspective. What would you prefer a user do when he finds a question and an answer, but the answer did not help him? The correct course of action is to ask the question and telling what did not work with the previous solution. – Madara's Ghost May 07 '14 at 19:24
  • Considering that restarting pulseaudio did not solve your problem (pulsaudio -k does in fact restart your audio), I suggest you identify your hardware and start looking at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems . Obviously restarting pulseaudio did not fix the problem , so rather then looking for new ways to restart pulseaudio, please provide additional information so we can try to offer a working solution. – Panther May 07 '14 at 19:29
  • @bodhi.zazen: Okay then, I would expect this to be posted as an answer. "pulseaudio was indeed restarted, so the problem is not there. Try looking at A. B. and C.". – Madara's Ghost May 07 '14 at 19:39
  • @bodhi.zazen: Also, what more information do you need? I'll gladly supply here and in [edit] to the question. – Madara's Ghost May 07 '14 at 19:41
  • You should explain what the symptoms are, what makes you think that restarting audio would fix it, what software you are using to play the file and what file it is (format). @bodhi.zazen is correct, this is how you restart the sound server. If it failed for you then the problem is elsewhere and you should post a different question (well, edit this one) explaining what the actual issue you are facing is. – terdon May 07 '14 at 19:51
  • @terdon: Noted and edited. – Madara's Ghost May 07 '14 at 20:06
  • can you identify your hardware, post the output of aplay -l – Panther May 07 '14 at 20:11
  • @bodhi.zazen: I have edited. Please see the question. – Madara's Ghost May 07 '14 at 20:14
  • @MadaraUchiha, could you add pactl stat output? – user.dz May 07 '14 at 21:34
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    @MadaraUchiha, Can you try with a live version of ubuntu or other distro (knoppix would also be a good alternative) to see if it is working there? – orestis Jul 17 '14 at 18:07
  • I have exactly the same issue on Ubuntu 13.10 on Gigabyte Brix 2807 system. Didn't find any solutions so far :( Suspect a bug in Ubuntu – Artem Jul 26 '14 at 22:36
  • I have a similar issue in 14.04. After reboot sound works. Then I look at a page in Firefox and sound stops. This is repeatable. – copper.hat Aug 29 '14 at 21:06

5 Answers5

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Ubuntu wiki » PulseAudio » Resetting User Configuration:

For some reason, pulseaudio's user configuration files can become corrupt(unsynced?) in some way, and deleting them (and forcing fresh ones to be generated) fixes a no sound condition. After using the command below, log out/in.

Ubuntu 12.10/Quantal (and earlier)

rm --recursive ~/.pulse*; pulseaudio --kill

Ubuntu 13.04/Raring (and later)

rm --recursive ~/.config/pulse; pulseaudio --kill
Elijah Lynn
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Ivan Borisov
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    Just wanted to mention that this worked for me on 14.04/Trusty Tahr and that I did not have to logout and log back in. Also a quick way to test whether sound works, from command line, is by using aplay for example, aplay /usr/share/sounds/purple/send.wav – Ashutosh Jindal Jul 21 '15 at 15:34
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    This worked for me on Ubuntu 16.04 – Josh Jul 11 '17 at 07:22
  • Linus' answer given below did not work for me ; Borisov's answer worked for me on 16.04. – Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius Nov 21 '17 at 14:25
  • This is working for me, but after about 30 seconds of playback it stops again, and then the same process works again. There is nothing in /var/logs/syslog either. – Elijah Lynn May 30 '18 at 02:36
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Please try the following:

Fix Alternative #1

Try reinstalling Alsa and Pulse audio in the following manner:

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio

sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio

And force reload Alsa again:

sudo alsa force-reload

Fix Alternative #2

Open the terminal and edit speech-dispatcher file by using the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/default/speech-dispatcher

In here, change RUN=yes to RUN=no

Reboot.

Let me know if it have worked for you.

Source: It's FOSS

Linus
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I have Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I tried everything that was ever recommended online, I was only able to fix my PC sound issue by running the following commands:

killall pulseaudio
rm -r ~/.config/pulse/*
rm -r ~/.pulse*

Some directories may not exist, that is OK.

then:

pulseaudio -k

then reboot

I found this solution here, there are also some other recommended solutions if this doesn't work.

Waqleh
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The current existing answers did not resolve the issue for me. It turned out the fix was much simpler in my case. I simply ran:

killall jackd

That's everything I needed to get audio working after restarting Alsa and PulseAudio for the last time.

If it still won't work, then you maybe really need to:

If the existing answers did not fix the issue, you might want to try this simple fix. It might work for you and fix your issue much more quickly.

Community
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Léo Lam
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0
 /etc/init.d/also-utils restart

Or 

 apt-get install --reinstall pulseaudio*

I think the code speaks for itself