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I installed 19.04 earlier today and spent an hour trying to get audio working. Then audio finally started working after I plugged the speakers into a different spot in the back of my computer.

Then about an hour ago, after audio was working great, everything got quiet and stopped working. I have no idea why this is and don't know how to troubleshoot because this is my first day using linux.

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It's very strange that there is an "Auto-Mute Mode" in alsamixer that seems to be enabled.

I am sorry, I don't know what I should be looking for or how to diagnose the problem and nothing I have found on the internet has helped so far. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks

Evan Kim
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4 Answers4

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Try reinstalling ALSA and PulseAudio manually. That must be fix the problem for you. Enter the following commands on a terminal:

sudo apt remove --purge alsa-base
sudo apt remove --purge pulseaudio
sudo apt install alsa-base
sudo apt install pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload
Pablo Bianchi
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Manvender Singh Rathore
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    it worked after I did what you suggested and restarted, thank you – Evan Kim Jul 01 '19 at 11:00
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    Upgraded 18 to 19. Sound's gone. Applied all above and problem has gone. – Vadim Nov 04 '19 at 13:37
  • this helped me even on Ubuntu 18.04 – Jan Kislinger Jan 13 '20 at 00:10
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    If you are using ubuntu-gnome-desktop, like I do, you also need to reinstall libcanberra-pulse, otherwise the 'test speakers' functionality in gnome-control-centrum will not work, which will cause even more confusion.

    I think in my case reinstalling alsa and pulse wasn't needed; I probably needed to poweroff and poweron again, instead of rebooting.

     – johanv Mar 23 '20 at 10:30
  • This doesn't work for me. I got: gsd-media-keys[2466]: Unable to get default sink and gsd-media-keys[2466]: Unable to get default source errors in my syslog. – Grant Apr 26 '20 at 12:42
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I don't have enough points yety to comment... have your tried this one? Sometimes my laptop audio goes off and this does the trick

pulseaudio -k

From man pulseaudio:

-k | --kill Kill an already running PulseAudio daemon of the calling user (Equivalent to sending a SIGTERM).

Pablo Bianchi
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pierrely
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This problem has been going around a while. I have a ASUS UX433FN with a Realtek ALC294 chip. From other threads it sounds like this issue (for dual-boot PC's) seems to be a result of Windows 10's fast boot behavior. I've disabled this feature in Windows 10, doing a full shutdown, and this has seem to fix my problem. Not sure if it's a permanent fix however.

How to disable fast boot on Windows 10

Jon
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    It worked for me. I have a Windows 10 dual boot and my audio would play for only about a second and then fade out, this fixed that. – Robin De Schepper Nov 27 '19 at 14:53
  • @RobinDeSchepper glad to hear it fixed your issue. Would you mind sharing what PC you’re using? – Jon Nov 27 '19 at 19:04
  • It turns out that it was just the full shutdown that solves the issue. Even with FastBoot disabled restarting from Windows causes the sound issues. I'm using an ASUS ZenBook UX533FN – Robin De Schepper Nov 28 '19 at 12:12
  • I upgraded my Ubuntu kernel to the most recent 5.4.0 aswell. – Robin De Schepper Nov 28 '19 at 12:14
  • I can't express how happy I am i found this answer, thank you so much @Jon as the last 2 days have been extremely frustrating for me, trying to debug this problem. I read all of the pulseaudio + alsa troubleshooting guides, as well as kernel bug reports. Nothing worked, not even reinstalling Ubuntu or upgrading to newer kernels.

    My system: ASUS ZenBook UX334FLC / Ubuntu Focal (20.04) GNU/Linux Kernel: 5.7.9-050709 / Win 10

     – petobens Aug 02 '20 at 19:46
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I tried all the reinstall-PulseAudio-alsa suggestions but finally was able to get mine (a fresh install of 19.10) to work by installing the Gnome Extension "Sound Input & Output Device Chooser".

With that extension you get a drop-down list of places for the speakers. When I picked the one into which the speaker was plugged, I got sound.

Note, my system is a build with no internal speaker and I had to do this the last time I did a clean install and almost every time since I got rid of Windows on this machine and went to Ubuntu. (However, a clean install of Cinnamon Mint did not give me this issue, if I remember correctly that is.)

Eliah Kagan
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Ecuador Guy
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