Monday, October 27, 2008

Sound problems on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

I've been running the Intrepid Ibex Beta for about a month now, and I must say it is surprisingly unstable and troublesome. At least for a beta. Now, when it is slowly approaching the release date of 8.10, it is starting to reach a certain level of stability and usability.

Something that was a bit more annoying than losing wifi - since I have an extra network cable close to the couch - is actually the loss of all sound. Except a crackling sound every now and then when trying to play a file (no matter if it is video or music). I have an Intel card, but I don't know if it only happens on those cards.

I did however find a small fix for it, I just needed to restart alsa, and force it to reload the modules. Why this had to be done, I don't know, but 2 seconds later the sound was back. Crisp and crystal clear.

The key?
alsa force-reload

This fixes the issue for good, also after a reboot.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

every time upon boot, or just once?

Anonymous said...

might not be an alsa problem, pulseaudio is a disaster, in ibex as well as hardy, if you remove all pulseaudio packages you can from synaptic and use vanilla alsa, fixed all the sound problems i had with ibex, including the one you seem to be talking about.

imo pulseaudio should be reserved for bleeding edge advanced user distros for a while yet.

Br. Jack+, LC said...

I have found that this post in the Ubuntu forum most helpful. All of my sound issues went away.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472

Peter said...

You just need to run it once, fixes the problem "forever".

Anonymous said...

What's worse than that...when I try to shut my system down (Ubuntu 8.10 of course) it hangs on "Stopping the ALSA daemon..." and doesn't complete the shutdown. I haven't quite figured that one out yet...and stopping ALSA before I shutdown doesn't work either.

Anonymous said...

Ubuntu still has sound issues? I have been complaining about sound in Ubuntu since before Feisty Fawn. The other major distro don't seem to have any issues with sound, why is it so difficult for Ubuntu?

Peter said...

@Brent: To be fair, I think it is important to state that this is a beta release, and I experienced the problem because I started using it at the alpha state. If I would have jumped aboard at the state it is in now, I don't think the error would have existed.
But WHY do they have issues? I don't know, but I think they are one of the first distributions that actually brings in PulseAudio as the default sound framework. The forerunners always have to take the heaviest blows.

Anonymous said...

It is a problem again in beta state, same as has been since 7.0. In a Lenovo with Intel 945 chips, including sound & video, Ubuntu updates have repeatedly disabled sound, video and parts of USB system even when unsupported updates are not enabled. Often the next update restores most of it. Repeatedly I have done new install to get sound, Thinkpad keys and X working same as it did before normal update. Updates with extended repositories is a bit worse. I keep a spare HDD loaded & ready to use after any update. Often the spare HDD has only Debian.

Anonymous said...

Peter, Fedora has been using PulseAudio for quite some time now- this isn't a "bleeding edge nobody's doing it yet" problem. That said I would tend to agree that this is a leftover from your use of the alpha release...

The WebMacheter said...

Great! this was my only problem with Intrepid, and was easily fixable! Ubuntu just kepps getting better and better :)

Anonymous said...

alsa force-reload or http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472 didnt work for me. I hope someone who knows what theyre doing can fix this quickly. Thanks a lot for your input.

kamikaze63 said...

Peter - worked perfectly for me. Thanks a ton!

windows 7 sound problems said...

Sometimes problem with sounds is because of the compatibility matter. The driver used by the soundcard with an older operating system does not seem to be compatible with the new operating system. It is better to contact a computer network solution to do troubleshooting with regards to sounds.