How do I get sound in Mint?
 

Hello Everyone,

I installed Linux Mint about four days ago, after a few hitches that I was able to figure out on my own, I got everything up and running and am enjoying my experience. There is one problem however, that I haven't been able to fix myself, so now I'm asking for the communities help. Since day 1 I haven't had any sound from Mint. I've tried videos through Firefox, music on Banshee, and system sounds but nothing is working at all. I have spent the better part of the last three days ripping my hair out and jumping from source to source looking for an answer and so far nothing has worked. I have tried a lot of things including forcing ALSA to reload, and even uninstalling and reinstalling ALSA and Pulse all together. Therein lies my next issue, I followed a guide off of the forums to try uninstalling and reinstalling ALSA and Pulse and it seemed all went according to plan, I reveived no errors during the process, but now my little sound icon in the system tray is missing.

Here is the info on my audio device:

Code: Select all
Audio: Card-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:14.2
Card-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Device 9840 driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:01.1
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: k3.13.0-37-generic


Any help is greatly appreciated as having no sound, while not vital, is a major inconvenience.

Thank you!

Have you tried using alsamixer? The alsa-lib site has a sound card support matrix. Have you looked into it?

If you get pulse up and running again, run pavucontrol as your normal user and fiddle with the settings (pavucontrol might be in a seperate package). Chances are you are channeling sound into the wrong sound card or your main card is muted, as happens by default in some pulse installs.

This is why I pick MINT DEBIAN over MINT. A suggestion is to create a bootable media DVD or USB of MINT DEBIAN and see if you just get sound when you boot with that as a LIVE distro. If that works, then install the Debian alternative and don't look back.

What DE(Desktop Environment) are you using? There is an applet missing or you have to add it to the menu bar.

Is the sound connected to a HDMI port?

pavucontrol usually does the trick. In fact, in my experience Mint is usually the best Debian derivative when it comes to handling multiple sound devices.

If it doesn't work, there are ways of sorting out the problem, so come back and tell us if it doesn't.

Even if the Debian Edition of Mint were better in this respect (which it isn't), Mint does not recommend it for beginners, and neither would I.