the sound on my laptop is gone

jazzo · 10-18-2012, 01:16 PM

HI there, I have a dell xps 17 and I have installed ubuntu 12.04 several months ago. Tonite, all of a sudden the sound stopped working. I can't listen to anything, music, radio and I am not sure what should I do to check if there is a problem, any idea? Obviously it's not on mute...
thanks

frankbell · 10-18-2012, 07:57 PM

I'm assuming you've tested the headphone output, as well as the speakers.

Try booting to a Live CD of something (perhaps even your Ubuntu CD, if you have one) and testing the sound using it. This may help narrow down the list of suspects.

If it doesn't work in those circumstances, there's a good chance it's a hardware problem. If it does work under the Live CD, it's quite definitely your software load.

JaseP · 10-18-2012, 08:21 PM

Check the mixer first (speaker icon, then mixer button),... It's possible that some thing was muted (it helps to display all available channels). Also, check by adjusting sound with the keyboard hotkeys (usually a Fn key and one of the Function keys in the top row). Some of the hotkeys enable functions in hardware (wifi for instance),...

If both of those are a bust, come back and let us know,... there are more places to check.

jazzo · 10-19-2012, 02:03 PM

thanks guys for getting back to me. Turned out that for whatever reason, the output got changed from "Speakers built-in audio" to "Digital Output (S-pdif) built-in audio". Switching back to the former resolved the issue. Now, how that got changed is a mistery. It happened all of a sudden while listening to music and I can swear it did happened on its own