PulseAudio

[stan]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2016 13:20:46 +0000
Richard Ibbotson <richard.ibbotson at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know a lot of people don't like PulseAudio but that's what comes 

That's so 5 years ago.  ;-)

> PulseAudio has ceased 
> to work properly.

Do you have a wav file available.  If not, just grab one off the web.
Then run the command aplay [wav file name].

Is there sound?

While you're at it run
aplay -lL
Do you see lots of entries?  How many sound cards do you have?  Is it
possible your video card is being mistaken for a sound card, and
because of random ordering of sound devices, now your default sound
card?  Look for the default setting in the output.  Is it pulse?

If you haven't got pavucontrol installed, install it.  It's a lot
easier to deal with this using the graphical interface.  Open it, under
sound -> mixers, and look at your cards and their settings.  Are they
correct?

Could it be that the sound card is disabled in alsa for some reason?
Pulse runs on top of alsa, so if this is the case, pulse wont work.
Run
alsamixer -c0
and check whether everything is alsa is working properly.  0 is the
first sound device, and usually is default sound device.  If you have
more than one sound device, check all of them.

That should get you started.

There's also an alsa-user mailing list you can access at gmane.org.
Reading that should give you troubleshooting ideas if none of the above
does.