How do I get my sound to work

Question

I recently installed ubuntu 13.10 and am having trouble with no sound output. This was never an issue with 11, which was the last one I used. I am using an HDMI cable for video and audio this time rather than the vga and I'm not sure if that is an issue or not. When I open my sound properties I have the Digital Output (s/PDIF) and the Analog Output but both are greyed out with the exception of the Balance and in the Analog Ouput I am only able to select Analog Stereo output and when I test the sound on either nothing comes through sound wise. My Desktop is hooked up to a 40" Westinghouse tv which I've been using with my desktop and works great with windows 7. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Best thing you could try is to run QasMixer or Alsa Mixer. I linked pictures rather than download links because you should install them from the terminal:

sudo apt-get install qasmixer

or

sudo apt-get install alsamixer

You run alsamixer from the terminal to view all your available audio channels. QasMixer is a gui frontend for alsamixer written in Qt if you prefer GUIs rather than terminal utilities.

You can use either of them to see if any of the audio channels are muted. Go through all available channels and make sure all of them are at a high enough level / are not muted.

I personally have never tried using HDMI audio in Linux so I cannot help you there specifically - but I will let you know if I find anything.

EDIT: Just found out this is a known bug with AMD devices using HDMI (do you have a radeon graphics card?). You can take a look at solutions over here No sound through HDMI out, 13.04

The latest linux kernel (3.13-rc2) will re-enable HDMI audio by default, so this should not be an issue in the future.