Help? Audio stopped working


WizardStan

Mega GP Mania
Joined
May 24, 2008
Messages
16,731
I need some help. My audio stopped working kind of mostly.

I run arch with xfce and pulseaudio. I wanted to turn down the sound a little, as I have done many times before, but oops I slipped and when I dragged the master volume on the panel I accidentally muted it. I then unmuted but it didn't come back.

I've looked through pavucontrol, alsamixer, xfce4-mixer, everything says that there should be audio: nothing is muted, and all sliders are at full (even the ones that shouldn't make a difference) and yet there is nothing. In pavucontrol when looking at the playback tab the "audio level" bar doesn't move at all. And then I switch to HDMI output and suddenly everything springs to life, my TV/monitor starts playing the audio, the "audio level" bar starts barring, everything works. Turn it back to built in audio and silence.

So for some reason I accidentally muted my internal audio device and can't get it to unmute. This happened once before, I (intentionally that time) muted the audio and couldn't get it to unmute until I went to the xfce4-mixer and noticed that even though the master volume was up and unmuted my headphone (or PCM, I forget) volume slider was still at 0: moving it up fixed that. That is not the case this time.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Audio muted but then won't unmute, even though everything says it should be unmuted? I've rebooted three times, once after forcing a reinstall of all alsa and pulseaudio packages.

Even if you haven't encountered this exact situation, if anyone has any ideas on what my next line of attack might be I'd love to hear it because I'm out of ideas, all I've got is "reinstall OS" and that seems a little extreme.
 
I encountered something vaguely similar multiple times: When muting/unmuting stuff in alsamixer sometimes there was strange behavior and when I muted some lines it automatically muted some others, but didn't unmute them when I unmuted the first one, and sometimes everything was unmuted and there still was no sound. I was able to fix this every time by just muting/unmuting random lines in alsamixer while playing audio, and suddenly I heard it again. Never bothered to find out exactly how this happens and file a bug report, I have to admit.
 
I run arch with xfce but without pulseaudio.

Never had a problem with muting alsamixer.

Using headphone port and speakers of my Laptop.
 
Ok, I have no idea what I did. I've just been messing with random settings for the last half hour, muting and unmuting and sliding things like you say, things I was sure I'd done before. Tried one file and got nothing, tried another and almost blew my eardrums out. I just don't even
 
I've had situations in the past where running espeak-enabled versions of Oolite when something else has an ALSA connecion open crashes that connection, so perhaps something you did crashed ALSA. In that situation I'm able to reset things by disconnecting that broken app from ALSA and reconnecting it either by quitting it or fidding with its settings (Deadbeef allows me to switch to a null output plugin from the ALSA output plugin, causing a disconnect).


I'm not 100% sure that all output was nixed, but at least that app I was testing would refuse to make a squeak until I sorted it (or rebooted).
 
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