GNOME cannot find any sound device anymore
 

For some reason GNOME doesn't detect any audio device anymore, meaning that all applications fail to give me sound (VLC, Totem, Rhythmbox). This happened without any upgrade.


There seems to be a kernel driver in use:

Testing sound via KDE system settings is successful (HDA Intel PCH ALC282 Analog), but some audio devices (HDA ULI M5461 ALC882) are grayed out.

Any idea how I can get this fixed?

Hi PasBern, So I'm understanding that sound did work in Gnome at some point? Have you installed any additional packages since then? To be thorough, have you checked your mixer settings to be sure volumes are raised and sound is not muted? What kernel and alsa version are using?

Good luck. ;-)

That is the weird thing, sound stopped working for GNOME all of a sudden. Testing sound in the GNOME desktop environment using KDE system settings works too. The mixer settings cannot detect any sound device.

Here is what aplay tells me:

It seems to me that this has something to do with GNOME, I did not in the meantime install any new packages or perform an upgrade.

Perhaps you have multiple sound devices and the one you want to use did not get assigned card 0 this boot. That happens on my system. Because I'm too lazy to do the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa_custom.conf thing to index my drivers. But I can cope with a minimal .asoundrc file.

$ cat /proc/asound/cards

$ nano .asoundrc
Where 1 would be 0 if your desired card got asigned 0 this boot. If you use pulseaudio you can use pavucontrol to select which card to use. Although you'll probably need a .asoundrc that points at pulse. The global one probably does if you didn't do a custom one.

Something not quite understable must have happened (Sound is still not working). Other users have sound (I created a test user for that purpose) and it is not restricted to the GNOME desktop environement. As my user I do not have sound, in KDE I am informed that the default audio device cannot be accessed, I believe it assumes the HMDI jack to be the default device. Which doesn't make sense as I use earphones and no cable is plugged in. Again, this a user-specific problem. There is NO .asoundrc-file in nobody's HOME-directory. I grepped all files for the keywords "audio" and "default" in my directory, no sensible findings came up.

These observations lead me to conclude that neither tinkering around with a manually created .asoundrc-file nor trying to fix the issue system-wide some way via ALSA settings gets to the core of the problem. Something has turned bad in my HOME-directory for whatever reason. So I guess doing the hard slog, moving all files and directory under /HOME away the copying them back one by will have to do. Linux can be so straightforward (excuse my cynicism, but too many bad things have happened under Linux)!

Is the user a member of the audio group?

Good luck. ;-)

The user should be in the audio group or it doesn't have permissions to use the audio device. And for pulseaudio it should also be in the pulse group. Although many of the more popular distros are very good at hiding such administrative needs from most users. As long as you stick with all the defaults.

$ groups <user>

or just groups if you are that user. Just think of all this as the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS version of stuff for linux. The main advantage is that linux generally does not relocate admin tools and rename them with every release and/or update. Although varying distros use different toolsets.

If you're using more than one user and using pulseaudio, you may need to stop pulseaudio and start it again between users to pass the permissions ball between users. Which implies "autospawn = no" in the client.conf so it doesn't auto-restart. So many "ways" to configure audio in linux depending on your use case.

Yes, I am member of the audio group, as I said, sound stopped working all of a sudden, actually while playing a video file.

So now I moved all configuration-folders out of the way and copied them back, one by one. Each logging in again, to see wheter sound still worked. Clearing my HOME-directory of configuration files fixed the issue. Well, eventually I copied back all file, and sound still kept working. So much for logic!!!! :rolleyes: