Sound troubleshooting

[GuiGuy]

I don't know if Ubuntu keeps anything in the system that may affect it if hardware is swapped out (like Windows does, only it breaks if you change a key component like, say... a mobo) but I have to do it anyway so fingers crossed!

I have changed MOBOs in the past without too many problems and rebooted from existing hard disk drives. The main trick is to drop the video display back to something basic before making the change. My most recent upgrade was a couple of weeks ago when I swapped the boards on my file server running soft RAID. Everything bounced back fine, except....

... audio. It is always the audio

[AbeFM]

My most recent upgrade was a couple of weeks ago when I swapped the boards on my file server running soft RAID. Everything bounced back fine, except....

... audio. It is always the audio

When installing a windows machine for some workstation programs, I couldn't download the network drivers since the network wasn't working. Solution? Boot off ubuntu install from another machine. Worked fine.

The sound for me is consistently bad. Not random, it's been repeatable for years across several versions of the OS and hardware.

It's funny all this work goes into making GUI candy when basics like "I turn on computer, can't get sound working" keeps the OS from wide distribution.

Really, would you recommend a car to a friend where the parking brake just never worked? It's a basic thing, and getting the bare essentials working should be a requirement.... ESPECIALLY when people like us are willing to put in the hours to provide developers with ANY information they need.

[SPARTAN-118]

When installing a windows machine for some workstation programs, I couldn't download the network drivers since the network wasn't working. Solution? Boot off ubuntu install from another machine. Worked fine.

The sound for me is consistently bad. Not random, it's been repeatable for years across several versions of the OS and hardware.

It's funny all this work goes into making GUI candy when basics like "I turn on computer, can't get sound working" keeps the OS from wide distribution.

Really, would you recommend a car to a friend where the parking brake just never worked? It's a basic thing, and getting the bare essentials working should be a requirement.... ESPECIALLY when people like us are willing to put in the hours to provide developers with ANY information they need.

I agree. Speaking of the GUI, I had to switch to Lubuntu because Unity (Compiz) kept crashing with the Nvidia drivers that came with the install CD.
And they call 12.04 a long-term support distro? You're gonna need it.
(I have no idea if sound works right yet, as there's no control panel to test the speakers from like in Ubuntu. I'll have to use VLC or something to test it out.)

[Inglonias]

Motherboard: Gigabyte EP-35-DS3L

I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu (12.04) on this computer, and I am not getting any kind of sound. I have tried going through the stickied sound troubleshooting procedure with no luck. Does anybody have any idea what might be wrong?

[Superserial]

Sound support as far as I am concerned in Linux is absolutely awful. Someone broke it in one of the updates in 11.10 and several months later nothing changed.

I tried 3 different soundcards on 2 machines. One is some several year old AC97 (prolly Via or Realtek), works fine on vanilla 11.10 but as soon as I do update sound degrades, starts crackling and is overall terrible.

Second machine has intergrated Realtek ALC850 which gets no sound and no ammount of trying to edit helps it.

The same machine also has SBLive 5.1, same poor crackling, low volume, terrible sound after one of the updates in 11.10.

So 3 out of 3 soundcards = fail.
I tried Lubuntu/Xubuntu and the awful Ubuntu. I removed pulseaudio entirely, edited various config files. Played with mixers. Nothing helps.

[AbeFM]

You'd think they'd just put the old code back in. While there's lots of eye candy, my computer is less functional as a computer with each release. Drives don't spin down, sound doesn't work, cd tray cycles randomly, pinching discs... I remember back in the old days where the computer just sorta worked.

All I want to do is serve files and show my friends movies once in a while, instead I'm constantly monkeying around like it's a classic car broken down on the side of the road.

Take the stuff that's known broken and necessary for a computer to be considered "functional" and just fix it. I've offered time after time to spend as much time as it takes to do diagnostics to help the people writing the code figure it out, but it falls on deaf ears.

[GuiGuy]

You'd think they'd just put the old code back in. While there's lots of eye candy, my computer is less functional as a computer with each release. Drives don't spin down, sound doesn't work, cd tray cycles randomly, pinching discs... I remember back in the old days where the computer just sorta worked.

Maybe try another distro? I've dropped 'ubuntu in favour of Linux Mint & its cinnamon desktop. WHile LM is, AFAIK, based on Ubuntu, it seems to do everything just so much better. Audio works, it boots smartly, seems well behaved. And oddly, I am getting proper USB2 throughput speed for the first time since Karmic Koala.

That said, you're right about the poor power management. Given the times, it is pathetic.

[javimixet]

Hi everyone... not sure if my problem fits here, so please redirect me if it's the case.

I have sound, my problem is that one of my devices (vx222) freezes completely the computer (no keyboard response, no caps/nums bloq response) when i run jack with it as device. The card was not recognized out of the box by ubuntu studio 12.04, i had to install alsa-firmware, and alsa-drivers, alsa-tools, etc... and after doing that and reboot, the system freezed just after login... searching I found that deactivating pulseaudio (via ~/pulse/client.conf ospawn=noaut) could help, and it do, now I can use the device for listen audio and control it via alsa-mixer, but when I try to use it with jack, or reactivate pulseaudio, all get freezed.

Thanks for your help and sorry for my poor english.

[dewdrop_world]

I woke up my computer this morning to find that the built-in audio output was not making any sound, both using headphones plugged into the phone out and also with everything unplugged trying to use the laptop speakers. It was fine yesterday. After a reboot, it was still broken.

The first troubleshooting guide had nothing relevent. I had already tried all that. I have a USB soundcard and I *can* do aplay -d hw:1 something.wav - but -d hw:0 is silent.

So I'm starting on the second troubleshooting guide. That's rather invasive, isn't it? Reinstall a boatload of packages, which has the chance of breaking who-knows-what?

Is there any harm in keeping the PPA versions of these packages? The guide doesn't say.

If it's better to use the standard packages, the guide doesn't have instructions to revert.

Nonetheless, I'm trusting... and desperate to figure out why the built-in sound is fubarred.

Will post the debugging info from the second guide when I have it.

James

[dewdrop_world]

I woke up my computer this morning to find that the built-in audio output was not making any sound, both using headphones plugged into the phone out and also with everything unplugged trying to use the laptop speakers. It was fine yesterday. After a reboot, it was still broken.

False alarm -- somehow the speaker got muted, and didn't un-mute after pulling out the headphone jack. That's fixed now and the audio is working as I expect.

The one thing that doesn't make sense is that I still didn't get sound through the headphones, even though the headphone channel was not muted. But it's working now, so I'm prepared to let that question go.

The second troubleshooting guide asked me to install a lot of packages, which I did. Should I just leave those packages in place, or would it be better to roll back to the packages that were there before?

James