Silence from the System

Everything’s going along nicely. One day (or session) you’re rocking along in Ubuntu Intrepid, playing music or video and having your computer play the system sounds when needed. Then all of a sudden your computer is silent. No system sounds. No music or soundtrack from videos. All you know is that you computer either got a bad case of laryngitis or something ran away or got abducted.

[Cue theme for Without a Trace]

We’ve already solved the cases of the stubborn keypad, disappearing desktop effects, flavorless WINE, and the picture management problems, but this new case is one that has to be solved ASAP. The abductee, you see, is a member of a very prominent family and calls are being made to get this case solved quickly or else our next beat could be policing problems in Windows Me.

[title: 1 Hour Missing]

We’ve looked at the Volume Control applet, the Sound Preferences, the Help manuals, and everything else we can think of to try to find out what happened to the missing sound, only to mocked as we try to play an audio track of use the Test buttons on the Sound Preferences window. Now senators are calling asking why we haven’t closed the case yet. It’s time to expand the search and talk to witnesses around the forums and blogs to try to find someone who saw what happened.

[title: 90 Minutes Missing]

We found a group that supposedly had some information that would shed some light on the case. A person named Githlar had something similar happen, and we talked with psyke83, and they told us that there’s a known issue in Intrepid that causes the PCM audio channel to get muted. He suggested we check the alsamixer, but that didn’t do anything for us. The PCM channel is the main sound channel for things like system sounds and other audio content, so we had a feeling we were on to something.

Armed with a new clue we went back to the Volume Control and looked at the bottom of the PCM slider. Sure enough, the speaker symbol was missing (thanks to the light gray on gray color scheme of the Mac4Lin GTK theme, one of our few complaints about the theme), indicating it was muted. We clicked the invisible button and had the Sound Preferences window run a test for the Sound Events and heard the test tone.

We called up Sonata and asked it to play a track. Tears were shed as the very happy ears were able to hear music from the system once more. Another case solved, and once more example of a *.10 version of Ubuntu being more troublesome to use than *.04 versions.

Perhaps next fall I’ll have to stick with the Jackelope rather than take the “K”-named 9.10 version of Ubuntu. Although it would be nice to find out why the *.10 versions are so frequently troublesome.

[Roll credits, thanking Githlar and especially psyke83 for their assistance in solving the case.]