Xfce Forum

ddwmusic

Member

Registered: 2017-07-23

Posts: 28

ThinkPad ALSA or HW volume permanently muted

Hi, new poster. I recently installed Ubuntu Studio, which ships with xfce4. I generally like it -- it's much zippier than Unity or gnome shell. But I'm having one problem I haven't been able to crack.

At some point after installation, the volume on the built-in soundcard got muted. ThinkPad Edge E431.

$ uname -a
Linux dlm-E431 4.10.0-27-lowlatency #30~16.04.2-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Thu Jun 29 17:10:52 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I'm aware of a number of threads on this board, and other boards, about PulseAudio getting muted and not un-muting. I'm quite sure this is a different issue, because I am running all audio through JACK (including PA -- I've configured PA to be running only when JACK is up and running, and PA is only using the JACK source/sink -- PA never connects directly to a soundcard, on my system) and I don't get any sound through JACK either. Moreover, aplay doesn't get any sound either.

The light on the speaker-mute key is permanently lit. Pressing the key doesn't turn it off.

So I'm quite sure that the typical solutions to enable PA volume muting will not apply to my case. It looks like something is stuck in the hardware layer.

Built-in soundcard:
- aplay: No sound.
- JACK (e.g., play a sound file in Audacity --> JACK): No sound.
- PA (e.g., play a sound file in Parole media player): No sound.
- I've turned everything up in alsamixer.
- BUT the built-in mic is fine: If I turn on monitoring in Audacity, I read a signal, and it responds if I snap my fingers in front of the screen.

That would seem to rule out PA or JACK as the cause. Also, the mic rules out the built-in soundcard being simply broken. It is possible that ALSA might be connecting to the wrong channels (but I don't think so -- I tried several in qjackctl: hw:PCH and hw:PCH,0, didn't try the HDMI channels).

USB soundcards:
- aplay, JACK and PA can all play audio with no problem. (If it were the standard "PA won't unmute" problem, then I would hear nothing through PA on external hardware as well, but that is not the case here.)

I can sort of live with the situation, but it could come back to hurt me if, for instance, I need to do an impromptu demo somewhere and I wasn't prepared with the extra audio hardware.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
James

ddwmusic

Member

Registered: 2017-07-23

Posts: 28

Re: ThinkPad ALSA or HW volume permanently muted

One more data point: I can dual-boot my machine with Windows, and... built-in audio hardware is fine in Windows, but not Linux.

Driver issue, then?

James

Jerry3904

Member

Registered: 2013-11-09

Posts: 863

Re: ThinkPad ALSA or HW volume permanently muted

This is not likely to be a Xfce problem, but here are a couple of places to start:

1) What is the output of this:

lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio"

2) If the kernel driver is snd-hda-intel system. try opening up etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.conf in a text editor and adding the following line at the bottom of the file:

options snd-hda-intel model=thinkpad

We have a running Wiki file on "sound not working" that might have some other ideas.

---

MX-23 (based on Debian Stable) with our flagship Xfce 4.18.

ddwmusic

Member

Registered: 2017-07-23

Posts: 28

Re: ThinkPad ALSA or HW volume permanently muted

It's with some embarrassment that I have to report: In fact, sound was muted in alsamixer, but I was confused because the faders were up. That was pretty dumb.

So... never mind. It's working now.

Thanks for the advice.
James