My sound has suddenly stopped working after (I think) downloading some Alsa updates a couple of weeks ago. Ive gone through all the settings and viewed the Alsamixer and nothing appears to be out of place but I did notice that the output was set to headphones so I changed that to Line out ( I have a creative sound card which has worked faultlessly for a few years now). I have tried many suggestions found on this forum but still cannot get it to work.
Has anybody tried pipewire and will it work on 20.04. The only reason I have kept to this version is that I signed up to Ubuntu Pro and it will update until 2030 and with advancing years i`m quite happy to make do.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS reached End of Standard Support long ago now too, meaning Ubuntu support is EOL, and the release is now supported only by Canonical via ESM.
This isn't a Canonical Support site; they provide their own support venues that are not used by the Ubuntu project.
FYI: Both GA & HWE stacks from 20.04 cannot run PipeWire as the kernels are too old. PipeWire requires kernels provided by Ubuntu 22.10 and later, or if using 22.04 you cannot use the GA kernel stack either with PipeWire; your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS HWE stack was backported from 20.04 thus is PulseAudio only.
If you had automatic background updates, you should turn that off immediately.
Instead, I strongly recommend, going forward, that you use Synaptic.
WHY?
Because it keeps track of all updates performed during each session. You could then identify exactly what packages were installed that caused a sudden "breakdown", and could attempt to reverse all of those to the previous version that was installed.
It would be highly recommeded to keep track of the versions for all installed packages before performing any updates, using Synaptic or other.
ALSA is part of the kernel, so it gets updated all the time. The user-space (non-kernel) parts are much more stable.
@chris36 pipewire isnt likely to help because pipewire is built "on top" of ALSA.
To confirm that the issue is with ALSA rather than PulseAudio (which 20.04 uses to mix and play or record sounds using ALSA underneatb) - try using aplay on the command line with any audio file (e.g. wav, mp3 etc) you have handy. This command doesnt use PulseAudio so it will help narrow down the cause.
If that works, then there might be an issue with PulseAudio instead.
The contents of the file /var/log/apt/history.log could help identify what has been updated. From there we could look at the changelog - its plausible that something in the ALSA UCM (use case manager) has changed which might have caused the issue. I'm going to guess that it wont be a kernel update that caused the issue.
Thanks for your suggestions, Ive looked at the logs and can find no reference to anything linked to ALSA at all. I`m minded just to go for an upgrade to the latest LTS rather than spend hours trying to fix it.
Thanks, I tried to install Pipewire but with no luck so I decided to install 24.04 LTS and as my home folder is on a separate drive it didn’t take too long. All working now as Pipewire is now the default in 24.04
Linux audio stack has always been a bit chaotic, so its hard to parse where responsibility for problems lie. Looks to me based on the changes that the regression was in PipeWire.
