Audio stopped working Ubuntu 19.04

Question

I installed 19.04 earlier today and spent an hour trying to get audio working. Then audio finally started working after I plugged the speakers into a different spot in the back of my computer.

Then about an hour ago, after audio was working great, everything got quiet and stopped working. I have no idea why this is and don't know how to troubleshoot because this is my first day using linux.

It's very strange that there is an "Auto-Mute Mode" in alsamixer that seems to be enabled.

I am sorry, I don't know what I should be looking for or how to diagnose the problem and nothing I have found on the internet has helped so far. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks

Answer 1

Try reinstalling ALSA and PulseAudio manually. That must be fix the problem for you. Enter the following commands on a terminal:

sudo apt remove --purge alsa-base
sudo apt remove --purge pulseaudio
sudo apt install alsa-base
sudo apt install pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload

Answer 2

I don't have enough points yety to comment... have your tried this one? Sometimes my laptop audio goes off and this does the trick

pulseaudio -k 

From man pulseaudio:

-k | --kill Kill an already running PulseAudio daemon of the calling user (Equivalent to sending a SIGTERM).

Answer 3

This problem has been going around a while. I have a ASUS UX433FN with a Realtek ALC294 chip. From other threads it sounds like this issue (for dual-boot PC's) seems to be a result of Windows 10's fast boot behavior. I've disabled this feature in Windows 10, doing a full shutdown, and this has seem to fix my problem. Not sure if it's a permanent fix however.

How to disable fast boot on Windows 10

Answer 4

I tried all the reinstall-PulseAudio-alsa suggestions but finally was able to get mine (a fresh install of 19.10) to work by installing the Gnome Extension "Sound Input & Output Device Chooser".

With that extension you get a drop-down list of places for the speakers. When I picked the one into which the speaker was plugged, I got sound.

Note, my system is a build with no internal speaker and I had to do this the last time I did a clean install and almost every time since I got rid of Windows on this machine and went to Ubuntu. (However, a clean install of Cinnamon Mint did not give me this issue, if I remember correctly that is.)