Ubuntu Audio Troubleshooting Guide

February 24 2023 12:26am • Est. Read Time: 2 MIN

When addressing audio issues, audio issues usually come down to one of the following. Power something off and on, restart a system service and reinstall the appropriate libraries.


Before we get into that, it's important to remember that sometimes the audio is working despite what you may see or hear. Sometimes it's merely something in the user configuration side that is tripping something up. 


For example:

- No audio with YouTube. Have you checked your Ubuntu sound settings to see if the sound meter is showing audio activity? If you are playing audio on YouTube, the video is not muted in the browser, but the visual indicator shows no activity in Sound Settings; you may be muted. Press the Volume up button on your keyboard. See if anything changes. Also, check for attached USB headsets and 3.5 mm jack connections to earbuds. 



- Restarting your sound services:

(Pipewire)

systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse


(Pulseaudio)

systemctl --user restart pulseaudio


- Reinstalling your sound services:

(Pipewire) (Ubuntu 22.10)

sudo apt reinstall libpipewire-0.3-0 libpipewire-0.3-common libpipewire-0.3-modules pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-bin pipewire-pulse


(Pulseaudio) (Ubuntu 22.04)

sudo apt install --reinstall libpulse0 libpulsedsp pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-utils


(ALSA)

sudo apt install --reinstall alsa-base alsa-utils linux-sound-base libasound2



- Dummy audio or no sound card detected at all. This has been a common occurrence with users of Pipewire. One thing that usually fixes this is to run the following in a terminal:

echo "options snd-hda-intel dmic_detect=0" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

followed up with:

echo "blacklist snd_soc_skl" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

These two commands will append two specific lines into two conf files. 

If rebooting does not help at all, you can easily undo both commands with the following:

sudo sed -i 's/options snd-hda-intel dmic_detect=0//' /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

followed up with:

sudo sed -i 's/blacklist snd_soc_skl//' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf


Audio issues with your microphone

To double check your input mic settings, first make sure the slider switch at the top of your screen (it's a physical switch) isn't toggled off.

Toggled off, no input:


Toggled on, mic has input and is active:


Does the input register to sound?


If it does not, you can make sure it's not muted: