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I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 from scratch, overwriting 13.10. Ever since then, I haven't been able to play audio in most desktop media applications: Spotify, Rhythmbox, Pithos, Banshee...all of them show that they're playing a song (including a libnotify popup), but no sound comes out, and the application's progress bar doesn't move. Web applications (flash, HTML5 in Firefox/Chrome) can still play audio just fine, and desktop applications that do not use indicator-sound (e.g., Audacity) can, too. The one indicator-sound application that I've found that can play audio is VLC.

ALSA info at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=63b1c39b80f5baa1f37190eea3c4b38bfff322d6.

Any suggestions for how to fix this?

EDIT: Just to be perfectly clear, I do have audio in most applications (VLC, Firefox, Totem, Audacity, etc.). It's specific music applications that are affected. I think it might have something to do with gstreamer (although that wouldn't explain why Totem works).

duncanka
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4 Answers4

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Try in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo killall pulseaudio

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install --reinstall pulseaudio

sudo service lightdm restart

or if didn't help

sudo shutdown -r now
JoKeR
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  • No go. Tried purging PulseAudio, too. – duncanka Jun 03 '14 at 02:25
  • did you try to play music and run alsamixer in terminal to check if you haven't muted anything? – JoKeR Jun 03 '14 at 02:29
  • Yes. I tried all the steps listed at https://askubuntu.com/questions/201780/how-do-i-debug-issues-with-pulse-audio. And as I said, web-based players work fine, as do some desktop apps. – duncanka Jun 03 '14 at 17:09
  • First of all go to system settings find sound there's an option you'll see test sound if it works then it's ok, there must be something's wrong with those apps, did you try to re-install those apps that don't have a sound using apt-get install --reinstall command? Did you check that sound is not muted inside an app itself by a chance? Did you try to install any new media player for example sudo apt-get install guayadeque to see if it produces sound? – JoKeR Jun 04 '14 at 17:26
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    As I wrote multiple times, sound works overall. Web players work fine, VLC works fine, Totem works fine. I've repeatedly tried purging and reinstalling individual application packages (rhythmbox, banshee, etc.), to no avail. – duncanka Aug 08 '14 at 03:54
  • The oddest thing is that the progress bar in the affected players doesn't progress – it's like it can't even advance the audio stream at all. Makes me think something's wrong with gstreamer (though I don't know anything about how gstreamer works, and presumably that ought to affect Totem, too). – duncanka Aug 08 '14 at 03:56
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If you have sound in your guest account, then most likely you have accidentally done something wrong to the pulse audio configuration in your own account. Try removing (or renaming, just to be on the safe side) the pulse subdirectory of the .config directory of the account that has no audio: 

cd ~/.config

mv pulse pulse-renamed

Then log out of your account, log in again, and you should have audio back.

Francisco Reverbel
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  • I already tried that – that was one of the steps listed at http://askubuntu.com/questions/201780/how-do-i-debug-issues-with-pulse-audio/202533#202533, all of which I tried. And as I've written in other comments, I do have audio. It's specific applications that don't work, and it's not just that I can't hear the audio – the applications don't even advance the scrubber. It's like they get stuck on the start of the stream and won't budge from there. (And no, it doesn't help to manually move around the scrubber.) – duncanka Aug 08 '14 at 15:07
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Regarding Banshee media player, I worked out a solution.

In Ubuntu 14.0.3, I (re)installed gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg/-fluendo-plugins-mp3-partner/-plugins-base/-plugins-good/-plugins-ugly/-pulseaudio & gstreamer1.0-fluendo-mp3/-libav/-plugins-base/-plugins-good/-plugins-ugly/-pulseaudio/-x, & everything works well, including video playback.

Stone Forest
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I had GStreamer extra plugins installed too, but not the GStreamer plugin for aac, xvid, mpeg2, faad. Once I installed it Pithos worked on my Dell desktop computer running Ubuntu 14. I'm piping the sound through an old stereo and like the original post other apps (VLC, etc.) were working fine...

MisterMello1961
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