Sound working before but not anymore

[Epic]

Sound was working perfectly before, but now I get no sound at all. I have a laptop and when I raise the volume up it actually shows that it's doing so but I still get no sound. It's not only the start-up sound but I also don't et any sound when I play music in Amarok. I don't know what happened and don't know how do I go about to figuring out the problem. If someone can help I'd really appreciate it. I'm new to Ubuntu and that's probably why I don't know where to start.

[DaddyX3]

Sound was working perfectly before, but now I get no sound at all. I have a laptop and when I raise the volume up it actually shows that it's doing so but I still get no sound. It's not only the start-up sound but I also don't et any sound when I play music in Amarok. I don't know what happened and don't know how do I go about to figuring out the problem. If someone can help I'd really appreciate it. I'm new to Ubuntu and that's probably why I don't know where to start.

Have you tried: System>> Preferences>> Sound ?
You'll see on the devices tab: "Sound Events", "Music and Movies", Audio Conferencing", "Default Mixer Tracks"
Go through the drop down menu lists under those categories. "Autodetect" will usually work - to test click on the button "Test" you should hear some awful sound, if not use the drop down menus and go through your different options one by one clicking the "Test" button each time till you hear the awful sound emitted by the test. if you hear it you should be good
screen shot of "Sound Preferences":

[Epic]

Thank you for the reply. When I click on test for every option in the drop-down menu, I get a Testing Pipeline window saying: Testing... press OK to finish. The test never terminates and it hangs there forever. This happens for every option on the three categories. I don't know what's the problem.

[DaddyX3]

Thank you for the reply. When I click on test for every option in the drop-down menu, I get a Testing Pipeline window saying: Testing... press OK to finish. The test never terminates and it hangs there forever. This happens for every option on the three categories. I don't know what's the problem.

OK, what you are supposed to notice is - during the "Testing ... press ok to finish" you should be recieving a nasty noice and it will stay that way indefinately until you click "OK". You can click OK any time you want. as soon as you click the "test" button it should emit sound imediately, if the selection you make in the drop down menu is the correct one. just go through them quickly with a quick "test" and press "ok" if you don't hear anything.

[Epic]

Sorry, I think I didn't explain my self well enough. I did as you said and never got any sound with any of the options. I went through every option just now and I don't get any sound at all. It's really strange because It worked perfectly before and now for some weird reason it doesn't. And thank you for the prompt response and for trying to help me, I really appreciate it. So, what else can I do to try to solve this problem?


EDIT: I give up, I'm just gonna reinstall UU and hope this doesn't happen again. But, thanks for the help you provided.

[drama]

i think alsa failed. happens to me almost weekly (have to remove and reinstall all alsa packages) maybe try oss or one of the other options instead of auto detect. if any of the others work then its a problem with alsa like i have. i think its a long standing bug though since ive had that prob since 6.10 ( its been ignored because its not critical since it doesnt effect the majority of people) also be sure nothing is muted in the mixer

[DaddyX3]

also be sure nothing is muted in the mixer

I'm going to be super if it was the mixer!

[Epic]

I'm 100% sure it was not the mixer. I found something on the ubuntu forums about exactly what you said. They told me to uninstall the alsa and reinstall, but when I did that it screwd up gnome and UU1.5. So I ended up having to reinstall UU again So dissapointing that they can't care to fix this bug as you said. I'm also getting a IO-APIC bug when UU starts up. Although I don't think it seriously affect anything on my laptop, I think it's a really anoying bug and I would like to get rid of it. I've tried adding "noapic" to the kernel line in grub menu.lst but no success. When I do that the systems hangs forever and never boots. If anyone has a solution for this, I'd really appreciate it.

[DaddyX3]

I'm 100% sure it was not the mixer. I found something on the ubuntu forums about exactly what you said. They told me to uninstall the alsa and reinstall, but when I did that it screwd up gnome and UU1.5. So I ended up having to reinstall UU again So dissapointing that they can't care to fix this bug as you said. I'm also getting a NO-APIC bug when UU starts up. Although I don't think it seriously affect anything on my laptop, I think it's a really anoying bug and I would like to get rid of it. I've tried adding "noapic" to the kernel line in grub menu.lst but no success. When I do that the systems hangs forever and never boots. If anyone has a solution for this, I'd really appreciate it.

Sounds like a BIOS problem possibly. Did some googleing :

APIC is the replacement for the old PIC chip that used to come imbedded on motherboards that allowed you to setup interrupts for your soundcard, ide controllers, ect. ACPI is the system that controls your dynamic speed fans, the power button behavior, sleep states, ect.

Sounds like maybe your BIOS is incorrectly set, I don't know how it could have been changed, but you could check it by (usually) holding down the del key at BIOS POST to enter setup (if you pay attention to the bottom of the first screen you see it will tell you to hold down " " to enter setup). Go through all the setting checking for "ACPI" and set to have BIOS have control over them. Also check this POST, it sounds very similar. I hope this helps.

[Epic]

Thank you for the suggestion. Adding acpi=off to the kernel line in menu.lst worked for me even tough it's strange that the bug was IO-APIC related and not ACPI. I'd like to know if adding acpi=off actually makes a difference on things I can do or cannot do in Ultimate with that option added. Thanks again for the solution, I really appreciate it