Laptop stuck on mute

Question

I have no idea why it's doing this.

The audio sometimes works, but now it's stuck on mute and is not playing anything in headphones or through speakers.

I'd really like to be able to listen to stuff.

With lspci I see a sound device and I've run sudo modprobe with the driver name. But in the Sounds app I still don't see any connected devices.

> lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio"
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 31
    Memory at d4720000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
    Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])

Answer 1

I figured it out how to make sound work. in alsamixer it was the PCI slider. It needed to be turned up.

However the indicator still shows the volume on mute, and the devices don't show up in Sounds. regardless, I can hear stuff through the speakers and headphones, so I'm happy.