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Ricardo Altamirano
Asked: 2012-12-20 21:08:04 +0800 CST

Is there another way to restart the sound system if pulseaudio/ALSA don't work?

  • 772

I was listening to music, and my sound suddenly went dead in all my applications. I'm using Ubuntu 12.04, which uses pulseaudio, so I tried sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart, but nothing happened. According to lsof | grep pcm, nothing is using the soundcard at the moment, although I'm not entirely sure if my source for that command is applicable.

Is there a way another way to restart Ubuntu 12.04's sound system from the command line without rebooting the system?

pulseaudio

9 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I've used pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload a couple of times, and it worked well. The first part kills pulseaudio, the second reloads ALSA. You don't need to restart pulseaudio, because it auto-restarts.

    • 514

  2. What I do when my sound doesn't work is 

    killall pulseaudio

    and then I press Alt + F2 and type in pulseaudio. It usually works for me.

    • 66

  3. Just for completeness, in newer Ubuntus versions that use systemd, I used this and it worked well:

    systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

    • 55

  4. In my case there were nasty messages in kern.log / dmesg:

    sound hdaudioC0D2: HDMI: invalid ELD buf size -1

    The solution was simply to suspend and resume the machine!

    $ sudo pm-suspend
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  5. For the new multimedia framework Pipewire, restart the Pipewire services.

    ❯ systemctl --user restart pipewire.service

# if the above is not enough, try
❯ systemctl --user restart pipewire-pulse.service
    • 4

  6. I encountered this issue with a USB audio device that would sometimes when booting the machine, not connect properly leaving me without audio until a reboot. If you are someone who is having the same issue but with a USB audio device then I recommend the following which fixed it for me:

    sudo rmmod xhci_pci && sudo rmmod xhci_hcd && sudo modprobe xhci_pci xhci_hcd

    None of the other answers would fix it and I assume that came down to the USB device not registering properly on boot. This simply reboots the USB devices. Note: you should only run all commands at once, running sudo rmmod xhci_hcd alone will disable all USB devices e.g., your keyboard, meaning the remaining commands cannot be run.

    I will be honest and say that I doubt that the xchi_pci part is necessary, so if someone is more knowledgeable regarding this please correct me.

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  7. Have you looked inside the folder to see if pulseaudio was available in init.d, try replacing pulse audio with alsa-utils

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  8. I had exactly the same symptom: sound suddenly died (after trying to use Audacity, in my case). The OP didn't mention he was/wasn't wearing headphones, which was my case. I tried all options here and, when going to Preferences and changing to HDMI or Speaker output worked, but switching to Headphones didn't work (no sound). I then tried to unplug and re-plug the headphones and it worked.

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  9. Sleeping + waking up the PC is the only thing that's fixed it for me (other than a reboot). I'm using bluetooth audio w/ the notoriously buggy intel ax20x.

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