Machine boots with sound muted. How do I fix that?

[Frank616]

One of my machines has developed the annoying trait of booting with the sound muted. If I unmute in Kmixer or ALSA, it works fine, and continues to work until the next time I reboot.

There must be a setting somewhere that controls this. What do I need to change?

Kubuntu 11.10 or 12.04 is the distro.

Frank.

[SecretCode]

I have had this problem at times in the past. I don't know what I did to fix or even if I have fully fixed it ... sometimes if I resume from sleep or hibernate the sound is muted as if it thinks external speakers are plugged in (inserting and removing an audio jack in the speaker socket fixes this).

Make sure that ALL outputs in alsamixer are unmuted and above zero volume. Make sure that "playback streams" in kmixer are not individually muted. As a last resort, it might be necessary to run kmixer (and/or alsamixer) as root, but I don't recall ever doing this and I don't know if it would work.

The settings, unfortunately, may be buried in binary files in ~/.pulse ...

[Frank616]

SecretCode:

Thanks. Like I say, if I just unmute it in KMixer or ALSA, it stays that way until the next boot. It is not a big deal. Just an annoyance. There has to be a setting somewhere....

And it is only one of my 8 machines that does this.

Frank.