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Sound was working on my laptop last night. I turned it off, and when I turned it back on this morning, sound no longer worked. I've tried various pulseaudio related solutions that I found here, including:

All of those have not restored my sound (though I have succeed in eliminating the pulseaudio icon in my icon tray, and get no graphic when I press the volume button on my keyboard). Other posts on sound seem to suggest the same as above. Any other ideas?

By the way, it is not a hardware issue. I have a (rarely used) windows install, and sound works there fine.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I had looked at alsamixer to see if anything was muted. I am not familiar with this utility, so I had simply looked before for the "MM" denoting mute. From seeing more examples, it looks like there is something wrong here. AlsaMixer screenshot

Edit 2: And the output from alsa info is here: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=3b51070b87416733947444b9c8c25a203d9d6507

Edit 3: The output from speaker-test:

speaker-test 1.0.27.2

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1022:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory
Community
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jdmcbr
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1 Answers1

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Various actions or tests:

  • Do software update, reboot ,

  • Carefully check Alsa layer volume running alsamixer in a maximized terminal : using arrow keys, and eventually F6 to select main (non-hdmi) soundcard : increase level in "master" and "pcm" fader , press "m" key 2 or 3 times to toggle their mute state (even if they seem not muted).

  • If not ok, disable pulseaudio to test in alsa only mode:
    mkdir ~/.pulse
    echo autospawn=no > ~/.pulse/client.conf
    then reboot .
    Then your are in Alsa only mode: test your audio (pulseaudio volume applet will be offline, use alsamixer or gnome-alsamixer to set volume).
    Most Linux software can output audio directly to Alsa without using pulseaudio (exception is Skype, but ok for Firefox and flash player ,vlc etc....)
    A good test is running "speaker-test" in a terminal : you should hear pink noise.

If stills bad , run "Alsa-info" to show your audio config (someone can have an idea) : copy the following command in a terminal , choose "upload" option when asked ("tab" key to select it) an post url printed at the end.
wget http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh -O alsa-info.sh && bash alsa-info.sh

  • When alsa test is finished and running ok, to revert to pulseaudio mode, run:
    echo autospawn=yes > ~/.pulse/client.conf
    and reboot (or run "pulseaudio" in a terminal that you keep open) .
    If Alsa test was ok and Pulseaudio doesn't work, reset again pulseaudio config like explained in the other threads
laugeo
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  • Thanks for the suggestions. I had tried disabling pulseaudio. I'm guessing that's why my icon disappeared. It seems like there is something weird about my alsamixer output. I added a screenshot, plus the link to alsa-info output. – jdmcbr Sep 25 '14 at 16:39
  • Your alsamixer is showing hdmi audio: press F6 function key and use arrow keys to select the main (hda intel) soundcard, you will see more faders. – laugeo Sep 25 '14 at 19:02
  • Use "up" arrow key to increase volume on the first "master" fader which is a bit low (from your alsa-info), try also tweaking other faders (well they seem ok from alsa-info) – laugeo Sep 25 '14 at 19:11
  • Oh, oops. I adjusted the volume as suggested. I then tried the speaker-test. That gave an error, which is shown above. I hadn't seen that before, so I'll look around to see if fixing that solves the rest of my sound issues. – jdmcbr Sep 25 '14 at 19:21
  • speaker-test error can be caused by "speech dispatcher" : in system setting , "universal access", verify "audio alerts" is disabled. Other point: Could you copy this command in a terminal and post the result : lspci -nn | grep -i audio – laugeo Sep 26 '14 at 11:23
  • I did not find "audio alerts", but "visual alerts", which seems as though it mutes some sounds, is off.

    00:03.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller [8086:0a0c] (rev 0b) 00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HD Audio Controller [8086:9c20] (rev 04)

     – jdmcbr Sep 27 '14 at 17:23
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    With no guarantee, test changing sound cards order by editing /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf : run sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf then add 2 line at the file end : options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=auto vid=8086 pid=9c20 and options snd-hda-intel index=1 model=auto vid=8086 pid=0a0c then save file and reboot – laugeo Sep 27 '14 at 19:36
  • @laugeo thanks for the hint regarding the change of the device order; this solved the described issue for me as well, none of the other mentioned changes were necessary (maybe checking alsamixer is ever a bad idea ;) ) – antiplex Jan 13 '15 at 16:01