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FinleyGibson
Asked: 2020-03-18 10:57:21 +0800 CST

ubuntu 18.04 no sound output from any audio device, following bluetooth connection

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My Ubuntu system has stopped producing any sound what-so-ever, since I used a set of Bluetooth headphones with it, though the Bluetooth may be unrelated, it was just the last thing I used.

First the obvious: No the headphones are not still connected, and Bluetooth is switched off. It is not muted in the system tray, and i do not have the program making the sound muted. I have tried several sources including the sound test in settings/sound. I have done both sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade as well as rebooted the system.

I have also tried:

  1. alsamixer shows the audio channels to be not unmuted and with volume, also auto-mute is disabled.
  2. pavucontrol shows several port options (headphones, speakers and line out) ports. Each showing a volume metre that is responsive to the audio sources on the computer, and the line out and headphones ports are responsive to having something plugged into them; registering plugged in/unplugged but no sound through either.
  3. input devices in both the sound tab of settings, and pavucontrol is responsive to sounds I make, so it appears the microphone is working.
  4. I have reinstalled pulseaudio and alsa-base using
sudo apt remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo apt install alsa-base pulseaudio

as well as reloading alsa with 

sudo alsa force-reload

Everything appears perfectly normal, except I get no sound output from speakers or headphones.

sound drivers bluetooth hp alsa

2 Answers

  1. I had a similar issue once and what solved it was resetting Pulseaudio to default settings.

    You may try: mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/pulse.bak and rebooting or logging out and then in again.

    If sound returns, then you may delete the pulse.bak file rm ~/.config/pulse.bak

    • 2

  2. So I managed to finally get the sound working by re-installing the HDA sound drivers for my machine using

    sudo apt install linux-modules-extra-`uname -r`

    seen here.

    At least i believe this was the solution. Sound just started working, and this was the last significant thing i remember doing. Would be great if someone could confirm this as a probable solution.

    To anyone experiencing similar issues, you can check your sound drivers using inxi -A.

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