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I was listening to music, and my sound suddenly went dead in all my applications. I'm using Ubuntu 12.04, which uses pulseaudio, so I tried sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart, but nothing happened. According to lsof | grep pcm, nothing is using the soundcard at the moment, although I'm not entirely sure if my source for that command is applicable.

Is there a way another way to restart Ubuntu 12.04's sound system from the command line without rebooting the system?

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  • 2
    This answer worked for me. askubuntu.com/questions/15223/… Aug 25, 2014 at 23:58
  • I think the solution really depends on the computer you have and the ubuntu version installed on it. For me none of the 2 top answers worked. joeytwiddle's answer worked. I have a Lenovo Legion Y520 with Ubuntu 16.04: sudo pm-suspend is the only thing that worked for me. Sep 3, 2019 at 13:05
  • This is NOT an answer to the question, however, this page show up in the top when searching for how to fix the sound in Ubuntu 18 and 19. When having trouble with the motherboard built-in Intel soundcard, this solution has worked for me: linuxuprising.com/2018/06/… Excerpt: Ubuntu 18: add "options snd-hda-intel model=generic" at the end of the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf reboot Ubuntu 18, 19, 20. Kernel 5.3.0-41 and -42: Edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf as root and add "options snd-hda-intel dmic_detect=0" Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.c
    – thomasa88
    May 16, 2020 at 15:07

10 Answers 10

529

I've used pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload a couple of times, and it worked well. The first part kills pulseaudio, the second reloads ALSA. You don't need to restart pulseaudio, because it auto-restarts.

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  • 18
    This helped to me to fix the issue 'no sound after suspend' I have suffered from for don't remember how long.
    – khustochka
    Aug 31, 2013 at 19:19
  • 2
    Sometimes you might need to clear pulse config with "rm -R ~/.pulse*" before issuing any restart.
    – Radu Maris
    Sep 23, 2014 at 11:33
  • 1
    It works for me after my USB headphone stop to work.
    – Felipe
    Oct 20, 2014 at 22:47
  • 14
    pulseaudio -k saved my life ! no sudo needed
    – Aitch
    Apr 10, 2018 at 21:15
  • 6
    still work in 18.04
    – Fat Mind
    Jan 29, 2019 at 18:34
70

What I do when my sound doesn't work is

killall pulseaudio

and then I press Alt + F2 and type in pulseaudio. It usually works for me.

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  • What is the difference between this and systemctl --user restart pulseaudio? The restart worked for me before, but today it did not and I needed to kill it (it seemed to automatically restart, when I typed pulseaudio in a terminal it errored that the daemon is already running).
    – Luc
    Sep 23, 2021 at 12:32
  • There isn't much difference in practice. This answer relies on systemd detecting that pulseaudio has crashed and restarting it. Your version does this explicitly. Sep 27, 2021 at 7:17
62

Just for completeness, in newer Ubuntus versions that use systemd, I used this and it worked well:

systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

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    this answer fixed my problem
    – Marlon
    Jun 21, 2020 at 17:23
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    This is the way to restart PulseAudio in Ubuntu 20. Thank you!
    – kas
    Nov 1, 2020 at 19:43
  • 1
    This, along with killing/restarting Alsa, allowed me to get the audio working on my Acer Swift 3 (Ryzen 4700U) under Kubuntu 20.10.
    – Pockets
    Nov 12, 2020 at 4:46
  • 1
    This answer is very useful since pulseaudio won't function properly after a session change (or CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE) in ubuntu 20.04
    – JB.
    Jun 3, 2021 at 14:13
  • still works in 2023 with an up-to date ubuntu Jul 4, 2023 at 7:54
29

In my case there were nasty messages in kern.log / dmesg:

sound hdaudioC0D2: HDMI: invalid ELD buf size -1

The solution was simply to suspend and resume the machine!

$ sudo pm-suspend
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    i don't know what was going on, I also had a mike problem, reinstalled pulseaudio and alsa packages, but the sudo pm-suspend trick did it.... Aug 11, 2016 at 10:33
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    Battery died on my Dell, did all the above, tried this as a last resort and it worked! Thanks! Jan 9, 2017 at 5:33
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    Same thing happened here - after battery died, headphones did not work after next boot. pm-suspend fixed it.
    – axel22
    Aug 24, 2017 at 16:29
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    In the last Wifislax(64 2.0)livecd -intoram. The 'mixer' dissapeared and OS sound got muted after all I've tryed all above none worked only this. Feb 11, 2019 at 10:02
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    Does someone able to explain this behaiour?
    – 18augst
    Mar 12, 2019 at 22:07
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For the new multimedia framework Pipewire, which became the default since Ubuntu 22.10, restart the Pipewire services.

❯ systemctl --user restart pipewire.service

# if the above is not enough, try
❯ systemctl --user restart pipewire-pulse.service
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  • You should be more clear about what do you mean by "newer version"?
    – user545149
    Dec 8, 2021 at 19:44
  • 1
    @s.ouchene Thanks, it shouldn't be a "newer version" :-) I have rephrased it. Dec 27, 2021 at 12:33
1

I had exactly the same symptom: sound suddenly died (after trying to use Audacity, in my case). The OP didn't mention he was/wasn't wearing headphones, which was my case. I tried all options here and, when going to Preferences and changing to HDMI or Speaker output worked, but switching to Headphones didn't work (no sound). I then tried to unplug and re-plug the headphones and it worked.

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I encountered this issue with a USB audio device that would sometimes when booting the machine, not connect properly leaving me without audio until a reboot. If you are someone who is having the same issue but with a USB audio device then I recommend the following which fixed it for me:

sudo rmmod xhci_pci && sudo rmmod xhci_hcd && sudo modprobe xhci_pci xhci_hcd

None of the other answers would fix it and I assume that came down to the USB device not registering properly on boot. This simply reboots the USB devices. Note: you should only run all commands at once, running sudo rmmod xhci_hcd alone will disable all USB devices e.g., your keyboard, meaning the remaining commands cannot be run.

I will be honest and say that I doubt that the xchi_pci part is necessary, so if someone is more knowledgeable regarding this please correct me.

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For me on MX Linux 23 (Debian 12.1) the following worked:

sudo alsactl -F restore
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Have you looked inside the folder to see if pulseaudio was available in init.d, try replacing pulse audio with alsa-utils

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Sleeping + waking up the PC is the only thing that's fixed it for me (other than a reboot). I'm using bluetooth audio w/ the notoriously buggy intel ax20x.

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