Volume control not working

Question

I am having troubles with the volume on my computer. The keyboard is working fine but when I turn the volume up and down, the indicator shows it, but the sound doesn't change. If I start the computer with a low volume it stays low no matter what I do. If I plug in headphones they are not recognized. If I restart with headphones though, it stays with headphones setting (so it stays with whatever setting I start, and I'm not able to change it after start).

I already tried purging and reinstalling pulseaudio and erasing the configuration folders (.pulse) doesn't do anything.

Thanks

• System: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS 64-bit
• Memory: 16GB
• Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz × 8
• Graphics: GeForce GTX 1050/PCIe/SSE2
• Disk: 1TB

Solution 1

At the end, it was this issue here.

I solved it by this solution mentioned there:

I think I may have solved the issue. Upon examining /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, I noticed that it no longer had the following line.

options snd-hda-intel model=auto

I re-added this line, saved, rebooted, and everything seems to be working now.

Solution 2

I had a similar issue on Ubuntu 19.10. My audio controls did not work and the volume indicator wouldn't even show up at all. These issues occured after messing around with QJackCTL. I can confirm that adding the above line into the alsa-base.conf file does fix the problem.

UPDATE: Another source of this issue is if you have QJackCTL set to run on login. Disabling this through Cadence or by some other means may fix the problem.

Comments

[MsKK]

Now, something funny happened while I was replying to this. I went to the volume icon and clicked on "Sounds Settings" and the computer completely froze. I forced restarted it and now the sound icon is gone. I can still hear the sound, but cannot change it.

[vlsh]

Used a fix described here: forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=91453. The only change I made is that I added [Element Speaker], besides the Master.

[Brent Bradburn]

Keys working (pops up), Volume working, but they aren't connected. May happen when pulse-audio is restarted. Try fiddling with "Sound Preferences" -> Hardware" -> "Profile". Set to "Off", and see if the volume slider in the applet is now connected to the keys. Then put it back where it was. The exact sequence is a little fuzzy, so fiddle until it works. Also, for fun, look at pulsemixer. It presents the same slider in a more groovy fashion.

[Bolli]

No need to reboot the entire system though, just run: pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload