Sound stopped working, Dell Laptop

[Mike Marchywka]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 11:28:17PM +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:
> On 17/06/2020 21:51, P. Echols wrote:
> > Greetings all,
> > I have a dell inspiron laptop with Ubuntu 18.04.4.  Also dual boots to
> > windows 10.
> > Everything was working, but suddenly sound does not work.  Volume is
> > up, "built in audio" selected in settings (the only choice).
> > Following some guides on the interwebs, I reinstalled alsa and
> > pulseaudio to no effect.  Oh, and in my efforts, I managed to make the
> > toolbar widget go away.  But still should work, right?
> 
> I had almost the exact same problem years ago.
> Turned out some random app felt the need to run
> off the sound when it initialised for the first
> time, and I couldn't work out which one it was,
> and it had effectively disabled sound. I never
> did get it working again, and as I was going
> through distros to find one I liked, whatever
> that one was I tossed it.
> 
> I'm afraid it's a matter of hunting through
> everything likely to have accessed sound (eg
> Youtube page in browser).

You can try apropos or "apt-cache search " for
various audio tools. I just made my own script for audio and
it looks like it is using pactl if you have that available,

volume()
{
echo setting volume $1
v="$1"
VOL="pactl set-sink-volume 0 $v%"
$VOL
echo done setting volume $1
}

apropos pulseaudio
default.pa (5)       - PulseAudio Sound Server Startup Script
pacat (1)            - Play back or record raw or encoded audio streams on a ...
pacmd (1)            - Reconfigure a PulseAudio sound server during runtime
pactl (1)            - Control a running PulseAudio sound server
padsp (1)            - PulseAudio OSS Wrapper
pamon (1)            - Play back or record raw or encoded audio streams on a ...
paplay (1)           - Play back or record raw or encoded audio streams on a ...
parec (1)            - Play back or record raw or encoded audio streams on a ...
parecord (1)         - Play back or record raw or encoded audio streams on a ...
pasuspender (1)      - Temporarily suspend PulseAudio
pax11publish (1)     - PulseAudio X11 Credential Utility
pulse-cli-syntax (5) - PulseAudio Command Line Interface Syntax
pulse-client.conf (5) - PulseAudio client configuration file
pulse-daemon.conf (5) - PulseAudio daemon configuration file
pulseaudio (1)       - The PulseAudio Sound System
start-pulseaudio-x11 (1) - PulseAudio Sound Server X11 Startup Script
marchywka at happy:/home/documents/latex/proj/cases$ apropos alsa
aconnect (1)         - ALSA sequencer connection manager
alsa_in (1)          - Jack clients that perform I/O with an alternate audio ...
alsa_out (1)         - Jack clients that perform I/O with an alternate audio ...
alsabat (1)          - command-line sound tester for ALSA sound card driver
alsactl (1)          - advanced controls for ALSA soundcard driver
alsactl_init (7)     - alsa control management - initialization
alsaloop (1)         - command-line PCM loopback
alsamixer (1)        - soundcard mixer for ALSA soundcard driver, with ncurse...
amidi (1)            - read from and write to ALSA RawMIDI ports
amixer (1)           - command-line mixer for ALSA soundcard driver
aplay (1)            - command-line sound recorder and player for ALSA soundc...
arecord (1)          - command-line sound recorder and player for ALSA soundc...
aseqdump (1)         - show the events received at an ALSA sequencer port
aseqnet (1)          - ALSA sequencer connectors over network
mpg123-alsa (1)      - play audio MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 stream (layers 1, 2 and 3)
speaker-test (1)     - command-line speaker test tone generator for ALSA

> 
> P
> 
> -- 
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users

-- 

mike marchywka
306 charles cox
canton GA 30115
USA, Earth 
marchywka at hotmail.com
404-788-1216
ORCID: 0000-0001-9237-455X