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I installed 19.04 earlier today and spent an hour trying to get audio working. Then audio finally started working after I plugged the speakers into a different spot in the back of my computer.

Then about an hour ago, after audio was working great, everything got quiet and stopped working. I have no idea why this is and don't know how to troubleshoot because this is my first day using linux.

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It's very strange that there is an "Auto-Mute Mode" in alsamixer that seems to be enabled.

I am sorry, I don't know what I should be looking for or how to diagnose the problem and nothing I have found on the internet has helped so far. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks

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4 Answers 4

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Try reinstalling ALSA and PulseAudio manually. That must be fix the problem for you. Enter the following commands on a terminal:

sudo apt remove --purge alsa-base
sudo apt remove --purge pulseaudio
sudo apt install alsa-base
sudo apt install pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload
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  • 1
    it worked after I did what you suggested and restarted, thank you
    – Evan Kim
    Commented Jul 1, 2019 at 11:00
  • 1
    Upgraded 18 to 19. Sound's gone. Applied all above and problem has gone.
    – Vadim
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 13:37
  • this helped me even on Ubuntu 18.04
    – Jan Kislinger
    Commented Jan 13, 2020 at 0:10
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    If you are using ubuntu-gnome-desktop, like I do, you also need to reinstall libcanberra-pulse, otherwise the 'test speakers' functionality in gnome-control-centrum will not work, which will cause even more confusion. I think in my case reinstalling alsa and pulse wasn't needed; I probably needed to poweroff and poweron again, instead of rebooting.
    – johanv
    Commented Mar 23, 2020 at 10:30
  • This doesn't work for me. I got: gsd-media-keys[2466]: Unable to get default sink and gsd-media-keys[2466]: Unable to get default source errors in my syslog.
    – Grant
    Commented Apr 26, 2020 at 12:42
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I don't have enough points yety to comment... have your tried this one? Sometimes my laptop audio goes off and this does the trick

pulseaudio -k

From man pulseaudio:

-k | --kill Kill an already running PulseAudio daemon of the calling user (Equivalent to sending a SIGTERM).

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3

This problem has been going around a while. I have a ASUS UX433FN with a Realtek ALC294 chip. From other threads it sounds like this issue (for dual-boot PC's) seems to be a result of Windows 10's fast boot behavior. I've disabled this feature in Windows 10, doing a full shutdown, and this has seem to fix my problem. Not sure if it's a permanent fix however.

How to disable fast boot on Windows 10

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    It worked for me. I have a Windows 10 dual boot and my audio would play for only about a second and then fade out, this fixed that.
    – Robin De Schepper
    Commented Nov 27, 2019 at 14:53
  • @RobinDeSchepper glad to hear it fixed your issue. Would you mind sharing what PC you’re using?
    – Jon
    Commented Nov 27, 2019 at 19:04
  • It turns out that it was just the full shutdown that solves the issue. Even with FastBoot disabled restarting from Windows causes the sound issues. I'm using an ASUS ZenBook UX533FN
    – Robin De Schepper
    Commented Nov 28, 2019 at 12:12
  • I upgraded my Ubuntu kernel to the most recent 5.4.0 aswell.
    – Robin De Schepper
    Commented Nov 28, 2019 at 12:14
  • I can't express how happy I am i found this answer, thank you so much @Jon as the last 2 days have been extremely frustrating for me, trying to debug this problem. I read all of the pulseaudio + alsa troubleshooting guides, as well as kernel bug reports. Nothing worked, not even reinstalling Ubuntu or upgrading to newer kernels. My system: ASUS ZenBook UX334FLC / Ubuntu Focal (20.04) GNU/Linux Kernel: 5.7.9-050709 / Win 10
    – petobens
    Commented Aug 2, 2020 at 19:46
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I tried all the reinstall-PulseAudio-alsa suggestions but finally was able to get mine (a fresh install of 19.10) to work by installing the Gnome Extension "Sound Input & Output Device Chooser".

With that extension you get a drop-down list of places for the speakers. When I picked the one into which the speaker was plugged, I got sound.

Note, my system is a build with no internal speaker and I had to do this the last time I did a clean install and almost every time since I got rid of Windows on this machine and went to Ubuntu. (However, a clean install of Cinnamon Mint did not give me this issue, if I remember correctly that is.)

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