Arch Linux

Linuxplorer

Member

Registered: 2017-05-26

Posts: 11

[Solved] No sound in new install

Hey all, This is one issue I haven't yet been able to resolve through research. I have a sound device on the system board, one apparently in the HDMI on the nvidia card and a usb headset that I use almost exclusively. From what I can tell all devices have been detected and drivers loaded. I had no sound to start with and at one point I had sound through the onboard sound device. When I started working on getting the usb headset working I lost that again. I installed pulseaudio and in pavcontrol I do hear the blip sound through the headset when adjust the volume for it. But no sound anywhere else. I tried a lot of stuff I found online but haven't got anywhere yet. Sound is the least thing I have had trouble with so far with the other distros I have tried so I am a little lost. I don't really know what pulseaudio is or does, it was just a suggestion to try. Alsamixer now shows pulseaudio as the sound device whereas it was the onboard audio before.

I could use a little help resolving this.

Thanks

Last edited by Linuxplorer (2017-06-02 14:02:02)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,743

Re: [Solved] No sound in new install

Pavucontrol's GUI should be pretty straight forward, on the devices configuration tab you can set your usb device to be the default. any audio you open now should appear in pavucontrol, if it doesn't yet play to your usb headset, use the dropdown to switch the output configuration device. You will only have to do this once and it should be remembered in the future. As for what pulseaudio is, there's our wiki and wikipedia plenty of other sources if you want to know more really, TL:DR it's a sound server that easily allows multiple applications to playback sound on one card.

If you require further assistance post

uname -a 
pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks
 #While playing something
sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
pacmd list-sink-inputs

Linuxplorer

Member

Registered: 2017-05-26

Posts: 11

Re: [Solved] No sound in new install

Hmm. I had been testing audio by going to youtube since I haven't settled on a media player yet. I decided to download vlc so I could play something while executing the fuser command. While vlc was installing I heard a click in the headset. Went to youtube and sound is now working. Vlc installled a number of packages so I assume something was missing a dependency? Will look into that further but will consider this solved for now.

Thank you