Sound suddenly stops working
 

Dear all,

I have recently upgrade my distribution, everything worked fine except for the sound system.

The audio stops working after a while. I lose the sound after several minutes of Skype use or while watching videos in my browser, it just happens....

But not only Skype or video audio stops, all sounds stop as well. I need to reboot the system to get the sound back, and then the same, at certain point all sounds disappear.

I tried many things that I found (reinstall alsa, kill and restart pulseaudio, install pavucontrol) but none of them seems to work.

This is the result of aplay -l

card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 0: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 1: ALC889 Digital [ALC889 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

The weird thing is that the audio meter of the output sound from pavucontrol shows signal. The bar moves when receiving sound but no sound can be listened.

Typing pulseaudio with or without sound gives me:

E: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.

I though the second line was telling that something went wrong, but the sound works at the beginning even with that message.

I do not know what else to do. Any help would be more than welcome since I'm really frustrated.

Thank you very much for your help.

When that event occurs try to unplug your sound system (speaker) or switch Off for about 20 seconds then On again. If that doesn't give a sound, try instead pull out the Audio Input from the rear socket (usually the Green hole) then re-plug it into the same socket. See if that improves. If not then the problem can be in the motherboard (if audio is on-board) or a contention between two conflicting modules (drivers) that are present in your system --in this case you may need to "blacklist" one of it to avoid subsequent involuntary contention after the audio system is working.

Hope that helps.

I tried with all the sockets but it didn't work.

I finally decided to make a clean installation in order to solve it. I even installed a new distribution (fedora) and... I did not fix anything because I have still the same thing with fedora.

The strange thing is that the sound with skype worked fine for long long time and then, suddenly, it crashed.

I guess is due to some update in the linux core or sound drivers. Using Google Talk I have the same problem, so it is not only Skype.

I made a post in the fedora subsection, let's see if someone can help me.

Thanks.

What distro are you using?

Now Fedora 21

Have you downloaded or bought the distro?

I have downloaded the distro from the official website. why?

It's a shot in the dark, but try testing with a live CD of something not-Fedora/Red Hat. Allow ample time for the problem to manifest itself.

If it does show up under the Live CD, it's likely something related to the hardware or the interaction between the hardware and the software. If it does not show up under the Live CD, it's something specifically to do with Fedora or Fedora's implementation of the drivers for that card.

I had initially the problem using Ubuntu so I guess it's nothing related to Red Hat.

The thing is that I used skype in my workstation with ubuntu for long long time without problems, then I (think) updated something and the sound stop working. That's why I decided after many many tests to start from scratch and I made a clean installation using fedora.

I give some more info here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...pe-4175539111/

The streaming videos (youtube for instance) show a strange behaviour when the linux sound stops. They don't run smooth, freeze instead. I remember that the same happened when I was with ubuntu, however they showed in fast forward motion instead.

It's probably driver related. You may be able to avoid rebooting by stopping all sound things and modprobe -r and modprobe the driver (snd-hda-intel). But it's probably simpler to reboot. There's probably a magic flag you can pass to make it play nice. Like noapic or other kernel parameters at boot time. And a few parameters to the snd-hda-intel driver.

# modinfo snd-hda-intel

If only to give you a few things to google on. It seems that windows users have an issue with this same chipset. The fix there is to disable front audio port detection or some such. I'm not sure if there's a linux equivalent to that. Using the latest kernel and latest alsa version might help if it's already been patched.

Everything started when I upgraded from ubuntu 13.10 to ubuntu 14.04, and I have now in fedora 21 the same.

So it seems to me that all linux kernel updates after v. 3.11 (which was in ubuntu 13.10) keep the issue.

I've never modified a linux kernel, I'm just a basic linux user. Could you please be a little more specific in your instructions to avoid rebooting? Avoid rebooting will help me a lot.

BTW, checking the folder /etc/modprobe.d

I only see the wifi configuration file: openfwwf.conf

But there is no sound configuration file like /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Thanks.

I am using Opensuse 13.2 x64.
The sound works fine.
I bought the distro with handbook.


Before Opensuse, I have used Xubuntu 14.04.2 (downloaded version).
With this distro the sound worked sometimes and sometimes not.

I gutted a PC last night and swapped disks and stuff.
Everything worked - except the sound.

My son fixed the sound by uninstalling & re-installing stuff and lots of reconfiguration.

He assures me that when he installed Skype some time ago, it broke the sound.

Whilst the sound was broken, I booted up a live DVD with Mint on it.
It played videos and mp3 files with perfect sound - proving that there was no hardware problem.