Sound card not working?

[Tony Baechler - BATS]

On 7/20/2015 11:34 PM, MR ZenWiz wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 3:17 PM, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It's due, but the longer this one lasts, the better.
>>
> Apparently that hope is now dead, along with all my sound.  I get
> nothing.  The pulseaudio control shows sound going out, but nothing is
> coming through the speakers.


Hi,

I'm coming in late on this, but what brand of sound card is it?  I'm asking 
because I had a similar problem and Kevin also mentioned not having sound. 
With certain sound cards, specifically the emu10k1 chipset, the sound is 
muted by default in Linux even though it works fine in Windows and none of 
the controls appear to be muted.  This bug was finally fixed in Debian but 
apparently didn't make it to Ubuntu Trusty.  I'm not sure about the latest 
Ubuntu releasse.

I can attach my asound.state if it helps, but that is not the recommended 
solution.  If you run the following command, see if it says anything about 
Analog.  Note that it produces a lot of output, so probably pipe it to less 
or redirect it to a file:

amixer controls

In two cases I've seen, the Analog capture switch (the wording is slightly 
different, but "Analog" will find it) is set.  If you toggle that switch 
with amixer or alsamixer, your sound will work as if by magic.  That, of 
course, is assuming you have a Sound Blaster and/or an emu10k1 chipset.  If 
you don't see Analog in the above output, I'm out of ideas.  I agree with 
Petter that Google is your friend in this case as I did see a page on 
help.ubuntu.com about this.  I've found that most Google results have to do 
with unmuting your card which isn't actually the problem.  As I mentioned, 
none of your controls are actually muted.  It is a "switch" instead of a 
normal volume control.  On a desktop system (not mine), Pulse made no 
difference until I played with amixer and stumbled upon the right switch to 
toggle.  Once I hit upon the right switch, his sound magically worked and 
everything has been fine since.  Just make sure to do the following once you 
get it working:

alsactl save

Also, once your settings are saved, copy /var/lib/alsa/asound.state 
somewhere as a backup so you don't have to repeat the process.