After update, audio won't play through HDMI cable

Question

Yesterday (June 7th) I faithfully updated a bunch of stuff through update manager (though I'm not sure what since I never read what I updated any more because I'm a bad person). Afterward, I discovered that I could no longer play audio through my tv via HDMI. The sound settings menu seems to have completely changed and the shell script that I wrote a week ago (with much pain and effort as I had never before written a shell script) to toggle between my laptop speakers and the HDMI cable output no longer works. When I type in

pactl set-card-profile 0 output:hdmi-surround

in the command line I get

Failure: No such entity

Presumably this means something with Pulse Audio changed but, while I'm learning a lot about the inner workings of Ubuntu/Linux, I'm not an expert and would love some help.

EDIT: So I noticed that

pactl set-card-profile 0 output:hdmi-stereo

seems to get everything working, so the name of the hdmi output just changed. Still, shouldn't there be a way to switch to HDMI through the GUI as well?

Solution

Try installing pavucontrol by opening a terminal and typing:

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

or via Ubuntu Software Center

After installation, you should be able to configure your audio device with this gui.

For reference see also http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Passthrough

Comments

[FuzzyQ]

Don't mention it, I'm glad if I was of any help. I was reading about this on Google+ the other day and thought it was worth sharing :) Have fun!

[Anwar]

You can also get a graphical tool for this same things. Install it with sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer command.

[FuzzyQ]

Pavucontrol is a graphical tool, but for configuration of pulse audio, while alsamixer, as the name implies, is a configuration tool for alsa audio.