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All sound devices are correctly detected and modules loaded. Had a look at the community docuemntation and ran aplay -l in ther terminal and got this:

cookies@ThinkPad-X230:~$ sudo aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
Home directory not accessible: Permission denied

The hard drive is encrypted and so is my home folder. Any ideas?

SOLUTION: Ask Ubuntu is a bit...weird to put it nicely. A bit ridiculous but I found my answer, and since I can't post comments with proper spacing, and can't answer my question I'll be dumping here:

Here what I actually did, from here:

# vim /etc/pulse/default.pa

Uncomment:

load-module module-alsa-sink

As I can understand from here, things should work normally, but for some reason the daemon doesn't want to play. Still a hack, but things work.

Uri Herrera
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Ashish Kansara
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2 Answers2

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I had an issue like this that was being caused by interference with Jack (jackd) on 13.04. I never had the issue on 12.10. I removed Jack and Ardour and all worked perfectly. sudo apt-get remove --purge jack ardour jackd

If you don't have Jack installed, consider any other packages that might be holding your sound card hostage.

Try running aplay -l without the sudo and see if that helps with your permission error. Occasionally I've seen root get denied access to folders in a user's home (which to my understanding shouldn't happen, but I've seen it).

Freedom_Ben
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This is definitely a permission error. You are running sudo aplay -l which should not be necessary. As a user you should be able to run aplay -l.

Probably you have to update the ACLs in /dev/snd/* (change username to your own):

sudo setfacl -m u:username:rw /dev/snd/*

You won't need to uncomment load-module module-alsa-sink in the configuration script. Probably you have done other things that - as side effect changed the permissions - because if you only uncomment that line you would see something like this if you run pulseaudio -vvv:

I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_direct.c: unable to open timer 'hw:CLASS=3,SCLASS=0,CARD=0,DEV=0,SUBDEV=0'
I: [pulseaudio] (alsa-lib)pcm_dmix.c: unable to initialize poll_fd
I: [pulseaudio] alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device default: Permission denied
E: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: ""): initialization failed.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Module load failed.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to initialize daemon.

And as you see it shows indeed that there is a permission error.

I hope this helps someone next time with thinking about permission issues before he/she starts to delve deep into the options of pulseaudio or alsa. :-)

Anne van Rossum
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