Cannot start pulseaudio

Question

I have no sound in application like Firefox. I do have system sounds (like the pop sound when you change volume).

I recently upgraded from 17.04 to 18.04 (big mistake!)

Pulseaudio seems to be broken:

$ pulseaudio -D 
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.

I have tried:

• Restarting
• Reinstalling Pulseaudio
• Reinstalling alsa

These lines seem important:

$ pulseaudio -v
...
: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)utils.c: could not open configuration file /usr/share/alsa/ucm/HDA NVidia/HDA NVidia.conf
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)parser.c: error: could not parse configuration for card HDA NVidia
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)main.c: error: failed to import HDA NVidia use case configuration -2
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-ucm.c: UCM not available for card HDA NVidia
...

Any ideas?

Answer 1

To be honest error you quoted is something that pulseaudio is doing casually. It tries all the devices it sees eventually enabling one that will work. In your case none worked probably, but I am pretty sure not because of bit of logs you quoted.

For comparison my pulseaudio does this:

I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0c' failed (-2)
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device hw:0: No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0c' failed (-2)
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D1c' failed (-2)
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device iec958:0: No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p' failed (-2)
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device hw:0: No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p' failed (-2)
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p' failed (-2)
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device surround21:0: No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p' failed (-2)
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device surround40:0: No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_hw.c: open '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p' failed (-2)

Answer 2

I solved this problem by creating a live USB stick and reinstalling. I was able to keep all of my data by doing a repair installation. The steps for re-creating a user account are here: How to restore/add previous user account