Jaunty updates spanked my sound!

**tixetsal** · June 27th, 2009

A recent (the past week) jaunty update p4wned my audio. I tinkered with reinstalling packages, changing group memberships, alsa, salsa, oss, pulse, and cheese-dip and bean burrito. Heck, I even sacrificed some small animals to the great jackalope, but I can't figure out what went wrong.
I was not sure what the catalyst was, so I reinstalled. The sound worked great until my first update and reboot, so it is definitely related to an update, though I am not sure which one.
I am running 9.04 amd64 on a ECS GF8200A (V1.0) ATX AMD Motherboard with HDMI Audio turned ON in the BIOS, although the audio I am referring to is desired from the audio jack in the back of the computer (not sure if the HDMI BIOS option is a factor), and I switched the video feed over to DVI because I thought that maybe using HDMI was "confusing" the kernel.
Before I reinstalled the only device that would show up was the HDMI audio out, now aplay -l yields this message:

shaun@brpc:~$ aplay -l
aplay: device_list:217: no soundcards found...

My volume control options seem to be much more limited than they were before the updates. I'm going to try reinstalling with the HDMI audio BIOS switch turned off, but I have no guarantee that this will remedy this issue. I am grasping straws...

Meh!
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**lovinglinux** · June 27th, 2009

I agree if your assessment. There are several threads posted the last two days complaining about lost sound after an update.

Nobody knows the culprit yet.

**RedSingularity** · June 27th, 2009

Yeah i have been seeing a lot of this same problem with the update.

**tixetsal** · June 27th, 2009

I discovered that by booting 2.6.28-11-generic, instead of 2.6.28-13, my audio was restored, as long as I booted that kernel.
I have reinstalled about 6 times in the past day-and-a-half. It's time to kick back and watch bladerunner...

**lovinglinux** · June 27th, 2009

Originally Posted by tixetsal

I discovered that by booting 2.6.28-11-generic, instead of 2.6.28-13, my audio was restored, as long as I booted that kernel.
I have reinstalled about 6 times in the past day-and-a-half. It's time to kick back and watch bladerunner...

Thanks for the info. Maybe you should post bug report on Launchpad.

**iamajd** · July 7th, 2009

I encountered this problem too and couldn't find an answer no matter how I worded "2.6.28-13 killed sound" in my Googling. Then I remembered an old fix I had to do before. I checked Volume Control and set PCM back to 100%. Viola! Good as new. Maybe (hopefully) this will work for you (or at least someone else who stumbles upon this thread).

**tixetsal** · July 7th, 2009

Originally Posted by iamajd

I encountered this problem too and couldn't find an answer no matter how I worded "2.6.28-13 killed sound" in my Googling. Then I remembered an old fix I had to do before. I checked Volume Control and set PCM back to 100%. Viola! Good as new. Maybe (hopefully) this will work for you (or at least someone else who stumbles upon this thread).

I appreciate the suggestion, but unfortunately, my sound issue is more complicated than that. My audio device (sound card) does not even show up as an option.

Here's some more 411: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1197673

**jstnhickey** · July 7th, 2009

Similar situation here. My sound became jumpy and now skips just starting last week.
Any suggestions would be helpful.

**tixetsal** · July 25th, 2009

My sound was miraculously restored about 2 weeks ago, even before all of the PulseAudio updates rolled out. I did install some codecs for multithreaded encoding / decoding around that time, but I'm not sure if it was an update or my own accidental tinkering resolving the problem.