[solved] No sound -- but apps *pretend* to play...

CaspianXI · 2008-06-08 20:01:50

No sound comes out of my speakers, but my apps (audacious, mplayer, aplay) pretend that they're playing (I get no warning/error messages)... even though nothing's coming out.

I have tried:

amixer set Master 90% unmute
amixer set PCM 85% unmute

as well as restarting alsa. I even tried reinstalling alsa-oss, alsa-utils, and alsa-lib. However, none of these steps helped.

Strangely enough, my sound was working... and it suddenly decided to die.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Edit: I can hear system beeps through the same speakers which no (other) sound is coming out of... Also, I've rebooted to make sure that no other program is hogging the sound card. I have also tried running mplayer as root to check to see if it's a permissions problem... but still, no sound...

Last edited by CaspianXI (2008-06-19 02:12:45)

Procyon · 2008-06-08 20:20:33

alsamixer, the ncurses app, gives a better view than amixer. Maybe it's called something else, like Front. If Front is on 0% I don't hear anything here.

CaspianXI · 2008-06-08 21:07:33

In alsamixer, I made sure everything's unmuted and put everything to 100%... still no go. Strange...

ido · 2008-06-08 21:18:05

Try the following command:

amixer set 'Headphone' unmute 80%

It solved my problem way back.

Last edited by ido (2008-06-08 21:18:42)

CaspianXI · 2008-06-08 21:32:45

I had already unmuted "Headphone" (along with everything else) and set it to 100% using alsamixer... nevertheless, I still tried that command, but no go...

I'd think that my sound card had died if I didn't hear system beeps coming out of it...

Strange, very strange...

I feel that either I'm doing something incredibly stupid... or something went terribly awry with my system...

Last edited by CaspianXI (2008-06-08 22:19:28)

pyther · 2008-06-08 23:22:06

Did you upgrade your kernel? Also make sure you speakers a plugged in (double check). I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out why nothing was coming out of the speakers, it was lose connection

ralvez · 2008-06-09 00:44:58

Have you considered it could as well be a hardware problem? Audio chips do die ... and software wise it may not be noticed, since the hardware is in actual fact present.
Try a live CD and see if you get any sound, so that we can scratch off hardware failure.
However, it it fails to give sound with a live CD your sound card may just have passed away ...

R.

Redroar · 2008-06-09 02:37:50

If you have digital (optical) and analog outputs, and you're using the analog outputs, then make sure you have the digital channel disabled. On mine the channel is IEC958, and if it is unmuted, I get NO sound from the analog outputs.

CaspianXI · 2008-06-09 21:41:15

Now that I think of it, I suspect that my sound card may have died... the problem arose suddenly without me upgrading or tweaking anything...

I'm currently using a shared Internet connection, where the router blocks large downloads... so I'll have to wait until the end of the week to download a live CD to see if my sound works...

Thanks for all the input, everyone .

I'll let y'all know the hopelessness of my hardware soon

CaspianXI · 2008-06-14 21:55:11

Yup, sound card was the problem. Replaced my sound card, and everything's working beautifully again.

Thanks for helping me identify the problem .

tigrmesh · 2008-06-14 23:57:30

Would you please mark this thread as solved? Thanks.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-06-08 20:01:50