pulseaudio not working

pulaseaudio seems to be working, but no sound. after totally deleting audio and spending a week trying to fix it, i have concluded that i am lost. ubuntu version 12.04

aplay -l** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 0: HDA Generic [HDA Generic] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

the last part of (pkill pulseaudio; sleep 2; pulseaudio -vv) seems to have the word suspended in it a lot? I: [alsa-sink] alsa-sink.c: Device suspended... I: [pulseaudio] core.c: All sinks and sources are suspended, vacuuming memory D: [pulseaudio] module-udev-detect.c: /dev/snd/controlC0 is accessible: yes

removed all audio, oops bad idea, been a week now and need help, thanks

4 Answers

There is a chance you have not initialized alsa, try

alsactl init

If this gets your speaker working again make sure alsa starts every time you boot by following this link

Try removing and re-installing alsa and pulseaudio:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio && sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio && sudo alsa force-reload

See this unixmen tutorial if it doesn't work.

Make sure that pulseaudio is in the audio group:

sudo addgroup pulse audio
sudo service pulseaudio restart

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio && sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio && sudo alsa force-reload

Jonathans answer worked for me after somehow messing up my sound configuration, running ubuntu 18.04 on my old Dell XPS L702X.

Works as it was originally.