Soooo… I will try and keep this as short as possible because I don’t entirely know what information is needed for people to help me. Essentially it comes down to this; I don’t have any sound on my laptop in elementary OS anymore, and I am not sure why. In the audio output area, it just says dummy output, and all of the solutions that I have found do not seem to work.
Just doing the command pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload, does seem to reload the sound driver modules. But does not solve the issue.
When i run the command pacmd list-card, the output is: 0 card(s) available
This I suspect is the root of my issue, but I have no idea how to rectify it. Any help with where to start would be amazing. Cheers.
I believe I have found the source of my issue, and don’t think it can be fixed
when running lspci -v | grep -A7 -i “audio”
The output is:
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 9d71 (rev 21)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 15a0
Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 16
Memory at ef128000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Memory at ef100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities:
Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_soc_skl
Which means that the built in soundcard is an intel 9d71 device, which does not appear to be supported by alsa currently. Or else there is a bug in the kernel that means it does not work. There are lots of documented cases of people with similar issues to me.
What I am confused about is how it was working previously, and was working fine to start with when I got my computer.
I would still love some input. I want to fix this, and I don’t accept buying a USB soundcard as a solution. I bought something other than a mac so I don’t have to have dongles. I ain’t about to go shoving a dongle onto it.
Ok, so I dumped my pulse config and it works after a reboot. Why would this be the case, what could it have been doing to make it not work before that reloading the default settings (I presume that’s what dumping the config and rebooting will do?)
Also, I’m pretty sure that previously I had tried to do that but it didn’t work… Oh well.
Here is the output of ALSA info now: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=edfe85df50ee64c180051a6cb410eff3c27e9ba9
Before I dumped the config files, I ran the other 2 commands and the interesting thing that I found was that it said probe mask settings for snd_hda_intel were invalid or something. I’m guessing that would have been the settings in the config that would have been changed when setting it back to default?
Thanks heaps for helping, I’m now just trying to figure out how this could have happened. I have been using linux on my laptop for about 18 months now and am still a complete noob, so it’s about time I learn this stuff.
I don’t know why that fixes things. Best guess? There’s either some sort of configuration or system state tracking information in there. There’s a few ‘tdb’ files which I believe is a lightweight database from the Samba project originally. My own local folder has a “card database,” “device volumes,” and “stream volumes.” I’m going to hazard a guess that your card got removed from the card database at some point? But who knows, really.
