My laptop’s sound has done the Disappearing Linux Sound Thing. I’ve tried messing with Alsamixer, removing & reinstalling Alsamixer and Pulseaudio, removing just Pulseaudio, and various other first page of google fixes. It plays for approx 2 minutes after a reboot, then cuts out. Occasionally, but not always, it plays through the headphones, but it won’t be tricked into working by inserting & removing the headphone jack either. Wat do? It’s boiling my piss right now, like.
Anyone? Anyone…? Bueller?
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You have my sympathies… it was headaches like this that made me stick with windows for my day to day use.
When I had windows do something similar years ago now it turned out to be hardware and a motherboard replacement… luckily it was a work machine so mostly a long coffee break for me at the time.
Are you running anything else when the sound cuts out? Stressing the CPU? Some other process starting up that kills it?
No, it happens just with VLC running. It’s a thinkpad X201 with an i5 and 3GB of RAM. It’s just a Thing Ubuntu Does. My desktop does it now & again too, but unmuting things in alsamixer always works there. It’s been working fine for over a year, just today it hates me.
okay have you tired a different media player?
No, but youtube has no sound either.
Nuke it from orbit?
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Try running “top” in a terminal window to see if anything is hanging?
Check logs to see if anything quit? Or some other weird condition occurred?
I use two handy utilities from the KXStudio project to keep track of my audio processes - Catia and Cadence. Because I am usually running Jack, ALSA, and PulseAudio simultaneously… =:o
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I fuckin’ hope not, I’d have to spend ages getting Firefox back to it’s correct level of script-blocked awkwardness and reload all my bookmarks, etc. And I’d lose my tab-farm of Interesting Things. 
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This used to happen to me back in Ubuntu 10.04 - Java runtime conspired with Pulseaudio to crash the audio stack every 45 minutes or so. Poettering really should be kept away from writing subsystems. Pulseaudio: crapware. Systemd is the devil incarnate.
Wish I could help. It’s been ages since the problem occurred to me (and went away in 12.04).
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I’ve been running Debian 9 aka “stretch” for a while and haven’t had any audio problems.
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Gaaaaah. All yesterday afternoon dicking about with the command line to no avail, then the baby whacks some random keys and it works again…
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When in doubt,
amixer set PCM 15 unmute
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How is it going? Did you figure out what the malfunction was?
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It’s just that regular Linux bug between alsa and pulse as far as i can tell. It came back, then went away again. I’m running updates at the moment, so I’ll see if that fixes it. I really wish I’d seen what key combo the baba pressed, as that worked fine.
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