No sound, not sure what device is being used

[Tommy Trussell]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 12:41 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is so puzzling.
>
> Looking at the pulse audio volume control widget under the mouse menu, I
> see it recognizes all three devices (mobo, HDMI on graphics card, PCI sound
> blaster).  All three are set at 100% sound, but there's not a peep of sound
> to be heard no matter which I plug into.
>

One of the first things I do any time I'm working with sound issues is
install pavucontrol -- Ubuntu's sound control has gotten better over the
years, but it does tend to be simplified, so pavucontrol may expose a few
additional pulseaudio options.

On your system you may also be running into a bug. I assume you may also
done some internet searches for your specific hardware to look for
workarounds. Years ago (longer than I would like to think) I had a system
with a digital connection to the external speakers, and I had to add a
kernel module to activate the digital audio output on the sound card.
Nowadays it's becoming rarer for such things, but it might be worth
checking.

I was just thinking of the things _I_ would do, but now that I think of it
here are some links that might be helpful:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure

These plus some targeted Internet searches are likely to point to the
solution!


[I wanted to bottom post "properly" but here's the rest of the thread for
context]


> On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 7:24 PM, Niles Rogoff <nilesrogoff at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I don't actually know much about sound, but I can tell you to look into
>> some of the configuration options for PulseAudio. It controls sound input
>> (from applications) and output (to speakers). In my experience, most
>> problems were fixed with apt-get purge pulseaudio and a reboot, though in
>> your case this may just make things worse.
>>
>> 2015-04-10 17:54 GMT-04:00 Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Running xubuntu 14.04, sometime recently the sound quit on me.  Having
>>> run into something like this on my Win-8 laptop, I'm aware of several
>>> possibilities.   In that case, it turned out to be the system's preference
>>> to send sound to the HDMI external port.  But the monitor I had plugged in
>>> there had a broken sound system.  I fixed it by changing preferences.
>>>
>>> On the xubuntu system, I do not know how to control that.  Because I've
>>> been trying various things, right now there's sound on the mobo, an add-in
>>> sound card, and one HDMI monitor (it's new, so I do not suspect breakage
>>> there).
>>>
>>> For starters, I'd appreciate help figuring out what the system thinks
>>> it's using.  I have no clue how to do that.  If I could, then I could try
>>> changing it to see if one of the sound devices works, or debug them, or
>>> replace them, or whatever.
>>>
>>>
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