Speakers not detected

Question

My speakers and headphones are not detected in the sound settings. They work fine but I can't change anything via pulseaudio. What should I do?

Solution 1

If speakers are not detected in your ubuntu version you can type alsamixer in terminal(ctrl+alt+t) and press enter You can go to headphones section by pressing right arrow Then press "m" to unmute the sound now you can listen sound coming from speakers Note:You should do this everytime you switch on the computer if your audio devices are not detected

Solution 2

This is a common problem with Ubuntu 19.04. When I first installed it, everything worked fine. But then I started facing problems with earphones detection/speakers with every other restart of my laptop.

The main reason for this was probably that the sound process - alsa - was not loading correctly. It's not a driver issue, unless you have an unusual sound card.

1. The first thing to try is to manually restart alsa in the terminal:

   sudo alsa force-reload
   

   You may have to do this twice, even 4-5 times. Go and play any audio and check your speakers and headphones after each time.

2. If that doesn't work, open alsamixer in terminal using:

   alsamixer
   

   and make sure your sound is enabled. No auto-mute or anything.

3. If that doesn't work, look at manually restarting pulseaudio.

For me, following the first and second steps did the magic.

Solution 3

Another solution that worked for me if your device does not show up in the menu at all.

pulseaudio -k

and now it should automatically detect all the things. If the above does not work then manually start pulseaudio daemon (In my case things started to work instantly without manually starting daemon)

pulseaudio

Comments

[Octopus]

I got mine going and I onlly did step 1. But also note that: restarting alsa makes my hardware appear under 'devices', but it also clears any audio apps I have running under 'applications', so those have to be restarted, too.