No sound on 13.10 -- sometimes

[Weyland]

Just installed 13.10 AMD64 on a big tower machine which ran OK with Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10 (apart from the horror of Unity).

At first the sound was fine, playing music and videos, but sometimes there's no sound at all. Rebooting sometimes fixes the problem, sometimes not. I had the same problems with 13.04, and I suspected Skype, but I haven't installed Skype on 13.10 yet. (Skype never worked on 13.04, on either Ubuntu or Kubuntu.)

Is there some way to diagnose the problem and fix it? I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware problem.

[Guest]

Is there some way to diagnose the problem and fix it? I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware problem.

Perhaps the strace and ltrace commands are what you're looking for? Disclaimer: I've never used them, so I can't really answer questions about their use.

[SteveRiley]

Linux sound is an unholy mess, with layers upon layers of abstractions. Problems could be anywhere, really.

Next time it happens, take some screen shots of System Settings | Multimedia | Audio and Video Settings so we can see if Phonon is getting messed up. Another thing to try is

aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

to check whether ALSA is working.

[Weyland]

Thanks Rusakov & Steve. When it happens again I'll do that.

[oshunluvr]

Try

lsof | grep snd

to see what's using your soundcard