Sound no longer works

[Nigel Henry]

On Sunday 08 February 2009 00:13, kirk abbott wrote:
> Hello,
>
> For reasons not yet known, sound is no longer functioning. I am currently
> working with 8.04 and clicking on the sound icon gets the following
> message:
>
> "The volume control did not find any elements and/or devices to control.
> This means either that you don't have the right GStreamer plugins
> installed, or that you don't have a sound card configured."
>
> Anybody have any ideas on what I should be looking at or for?
>
> Kirk

Hi Kirk.

Have you just upgraded to Hardy 8.0.4, or was the sound working, but has just 
stopped?

My Hardy install is Kubuntu, and sounds are ok, and pulseaudio doesn't enter 
the equation on Kubuntu, but did you have a whole bunch of updates installed 
just before the sound stopped working?

Have you started using a usb device, which is sound related (webcam, usb midi 
keyboard, etc). I know on my Debian installs I had problems with my usb midi 
keyboard. The usb starts early in the boot sequence, and alsa would detect my 
usb midi keyboard as a soundcard, and set it as card0. consequently the 
actual soundcard which needed card0, could no longer use it, as the midi 
keyboard was using it, which resulted in no soundcard being detected, and no 
sounds. If so remove the usb device, and reboot. the fix is easy for this 
problem, but later.

Would you post the following output please.

cat /proc/asound/cards
lsmod | grep snd
lspci -vn    (just the bit for the soundcard)

If the soundcard is an hda intel one, the following output.
grep ^Codec /proc/asound/card?/codec*

To check alsamixer settings, if the Gnome volume control is lying, open 
alsamixer as below for card0, card1, etc, which will bypass the default 
opening of alsamixer, where you only get the one pulseaudio control.

alsamixer -D hw:0            (this is for card0)
alsamixer -D hw:1            (for card1)

Are you using the latest Hardy 2.6.24 kernel, or a hand rolled one?
uname -r

Over to you.

Nigel.