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I'm running 13.10 (all up-to-date) on a Lenovo laptop with a Griffin iMic USB audio device. Though I occasionally have to use the Pulse Audio volume control tool to re-select the iMic, it works consistently from everything on the system except Chrome, which basically has no audio at all.

With most applications that want to use the audio stuff, you see something in the first tab of pavucontrol. Not Chrome; there's just nothing.

Some ancient forum posts here and there suggested symlinking the Firefox "plugins" directory over to Chrome's installation directory, which seems pretty goofy and which doesn't work now anyway.

Chrome version is 34.0.1847.132.

Is there some trick to making Chrome work with a USB audio device? (As far as I can tell it doesn't work with built-in audio either ...)

edit — Still not working, now on 14.04 and Chrome 37.0.2062.120

More info:

Chrome's been reinstalled more than once, with no effect. I've also tried the beta (currently Chrome 38.0.2125.77 beta). The PulseAudio manager tool, in its list of clients, shows Firefox and various other things, and also "Chrome input" but no "Chrome output".

Chromium behaves exactly the same way.

edit — now on an (old and tired) 15.04 installation. Chrome (Version 49.0.2623.112 (64-bit)) still does not work, though on full moon nights or something else random it'll send sound through the built-in analog audio on the laptop. However, Chromium (Version 48.0.2564.82 Ubuntu 15.04 (64-bit)) does work now, and it works through the USB audio device. I don't know of any particular thing I've done lately to make that true, but

Pointy
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10 Answers10

140

I had the same problem. It ended up being that my system was trying to put Chrome's sound through the HDMI even though the HDMI chord was not plugged in at the time. Presumably, this could happen with any audio output device. The sound settings Ubuntu offers didn't show this nor let me change it for the individual application, but pavucontrol did.

To install pavucontrol from the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

To open pavucontrol from the Terminal:

pavucontrol

Select the "Playback" menu and make sure that you have it set to Show Applications. Now, start playing something from Google Chrome. It will show up there, and it will show what output device is being used for Google Chrome. Make sure it is set to the output device you are trying to use.

Colonel Trogdor
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60

This work for me (Ubuntu 14.04):

killall pulseaudio
rm -r ~/.config/pulse/*
rm -r ~/.pulse*

And reboot.

These commands will stop pulseaudio and remove its current configuration, to start with the defaults again.

ONeZetty
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10

Before wiping out the entire Chrome configuration directory, try this: switch to another audio output device and then switch back to the original one. If you have only one audio device, connect an external one (like HDMI or USB audio) and then perform the above trick.

Update The following seems to prevent the problem from reappearing in the future:

  • Edit /etc/pulse/default.pa, find the line that starts with load-module module-stream-restore and add restore_device=false at the end so that the line looks like this:

    load-module module-stream-restore restore_device=false

  • Do killall pulseaudio

revl
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2

I had a similar problem. My laptop had two sound cards, one for built-in audio from the laptop speakers, the other to come through the hdmi output. When I was playing music or something that used the browsers sound, it was channeling the sound through the hdmi channel. From the kmix sound manager, I could see that chrome was listed in the playback streams but if you right clicked on the chrome icon and select move, there was an option to change the audio output for the stream. I made sure it wasn't hdmi, since I wanted the sound to come from my speakers or headphones.

Juan
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2

None of the above worked form, been without sound in chrome for a week. Then I started SMplayer, no sound also, Options>Pregerences>Audio switched from pulseaudio to alsa.

Next time I started chrome sound works.

Dražen Tiga Klepac
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1

Chrome comes with an integrated flash player and it does not always work well.

If you have sound with Firefox on websites like youtube or deezer, maybe you already have a Flash player on your system: the package "flashplugin-installer".

If not:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Then, you can set which Flash player you want in Chrome's plugins setting:

  • open a new tab, type chrome://plugins instead of a URL
  • click on details on the right,
  • select Adobe Flash Player
  • you will see two different "sub" plugins
  • disable the current one and enable the other one
  • restart Chrome

You can also find a short video about how to do it with on Chrome for Windows, this is the same way in Ubuntu:
http://youtu.be/cDgwNzEFuFY

ttoine
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1

Check you are running the right architecture of Chrome.

I had i386 Chrome installed on a 64 bit system and had this issue. When I uninstalled and installed the 64bit version, audio worked fine.

Alex
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0

I had the same problem you may not notice any issue immediately after i install chrome-remote-desktop problem occurs after i reboot my pc. so following worked for me. I am using : Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

  1. sudo apt-get autoremove chrome-remote-desktop
  2. killall pulseaudio rm -r ~/.config/pulse/* rm -r ~/.pulse*

copy and past each line in the terminal. Hope it helps

Afsal
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0

A simple reinstall of Chrome worked for me on Ubuntu 14.04.

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable --reinstall

Kidquick
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0

Yesterday you might have simply right-clicked a tab, and selected "Mute site", and forgot about it. Now e.g., none of YouTube's videos have sound!

Perhaps you got a phone call while watching a video, just before leaving work.

So simply right click the tab, and click "Unmute site"!

Dan Jacobson
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