No sound after upgrade to 18.10

Support & Help Requests
1

After upgrading from 18.04 to 18.10, I have quite an annoying issue: I have no sound. The sound settings actually don’t see my audio chip (on the motherboard) and only shows the HDMI output of my graphic card.

lspci shows both fine:

00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde/Pitcairn HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 7700/7800 Series]

Alsamixer seems to see them both (and the correct one is set as default) and nothing seems to be mute. I’ve tried deleting the local settings for PulseAudio (~/.config/pulse and ~/.pulse-cookie) but no change.

Also tried to remove and reinstall the snap for pulsemixer, no change.

Any idea?

2

Ok, solved by removing the package timidity (and timitidy-daemon). I’m not sure they are installed on Ubuntu MATE by default, they were more probably installed by ScummVM a while ago.

So, it looks like the Timidity daemon was grabbing the sound card before PulseAudio could initialize, thus preventing it to see it.

Just in case somebody runs into a similar issue, this can happen with fluidsynth too or any other sound server installed (jack…).