Ubuntu – Ubuntu 14.04 sound suddenly stopped working, reboot did not fix

alsapulseaudio

I am running Ubuntu 14.04 on an ASUS X52J laptop.

I was watching a lecture on Google Chrome, when suddenly, all sound was lost. Throughout the PC. No sounds from Chrome (even though Chrome indicates it does play sound). No sounds from VLC, and no sounds from pulseaudio's sound tests.

I've tried:

  • Restarting pulseaudio via pulseaudio --kill.
  • Reloading ALSA via alsa reload and alsa force-reload.
  • Checking the ALSA mixer via alsamixer, nothing out of the ordinary.
  • Restart my PC. Did not help, didn't even hear the drum sound on startup.
  • mved my ~/.config/pulse file away and killed pulseaudio again.
  • pacmd list-sinks | grep muted indicates that nothing is muted.

I'm not sure what to do anymore. Could this be a hardware problem? Is there anything I haven't tried yet?

Output of aplay -l:

madara@Madara-PC:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 0: CONEXANT Analog [CONEXANT Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Best Answer

Ubuntu wiki » PulseAudio » Resetting User Configuration:

For some reason, pulseaudio's user configuration files can become corrupt(unsynced?) in some way, and deleting them (and forcing fresh ones to be generated) fixes a no sound condition. After using the command below, log out/in.

Ubuntu 12.10/Quantal (and earlier)

rm --recursive ~/.pulse*; pulseaudio --kill

Ubuntu 13.04/Raring (and later)

rm --recursive ~/.config/pulse; pulseaudio --kill
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