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new to linux, pls be gentle. i have ubuntu 20.04 and an external usb soundcard (saffire 6 usb). after initially installing ubuntu this soundcard just worked – i actually remember being quite surprised about that and thought, cool... now, for other reasons i messed around with nivida graphics drivers (de- and reinstalled) and/or maybe connected it to another usb port and it ceased to work. in the settings (where it used to be listed) there is only a "dummy output". i tried pretty much all of what i found on google but to no avail. i think the main problem is that it does not even get power as the basic "usb connection light" is not lit. it does work under windows though, so there is no hardware / connection problem. also lsusb does list the device as "Focusrite-Novation Saffire 6", but 'aplay -l' returns "no soundcards found" although i did reinstall and restart alsa and stuff. so... how do i get this fixed?

user3647558
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  • It is impossible to guess what you did when "messed around with nivida graphics drivers ". It shouldn't affect the sound, but who knows what commands you ran. – Pilot6 Jun 13 '20 at 19:31
  • wow, this i quick, thanks for helping! in the gui in "software & updates" i switched to the nouveau drivers. then the gui did not let me switch back so i reinstalled nvidia-driver-440 through terminal (purging the old drivers). these are the same drivers i had installed before. note however i try to use an external usb audio device... – user3647558 Jun 13 '20 at 19:39
  • i backtracked through my terminal, i ran: sudo apt-get purge nvidia* && sudo apt autoremove && sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall – user3647558 Jun 13 '20 at 19:45
  • There it is, among those commands is sudo apt autoremove. There is a slight chance that it removed something that was not meant to. It is possible to check and to have an overview about what it would do by using it with the --dry-run or --simulate option, as discussed here: https://askubuntu.com/a/1312081/1157519 Then a later update might have restored the mistakenly removed dependency... Btw. apt also has relevant options: --fix-broken and --fix-missing. Luckily you don't need them any more. :) – Levente Dec 25 '22 at 09:15

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just for reference: it solved itself. i have no idea how, as i definitely did restart and dis-/reconnect this soundcard a few times before posting. maybe it sorted itself out with just a normal update - any way it's miraculously working again, yay! sorry for bothering, but never the less thanks for the help!

user3647558
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