The one procedure I use to fix non-working sound on Linux consists of 1 - look at the package manager for pulse-audio; 2 - Uninstall it.
Works every single time. last time I did it was around March. (I still don't know how it creeps back into my computers.)
Last time pulse was creating problems for me I decided that since I was now writing an application that links to the sound system, let's stop linking to low level functions and use pulse abstractions that some people claim to be better.
Turns out that the pulse "abstractions" are basically verbatim copies of alsa. Just with some added badly documented options. Some with very descriptive names, other with cryptic ones, but whatever, no option seems to do exactly what its name implies. Besides, pulse abstracts away most of the flexibility of the sound hardware, so you can't use it, and well, every time I tried running something with it, I got an assertion failure on pulse code... Always with some completely non-descriptive description.
Works every single time. last time I did it was around March. (I still don't know how it creeps back into my computers.)
Last time pulse was creating problems for me I decided that since I was now writing an application that links to the sound system, let's stop linking to low level functions and use pulse abstractions that some people claim to be better.
Turns out that the pulse "abstractions" are basically verbatim copies of alsa. Just with some added badly documented options. Some with very descriptive names, other with cryptic ones, but whatever, no option seems to do exactly what its name implies. Besides, pulse abstracts away most of the flexibility of the sound hardware, so you can't use it, and well, every time I tried running something with it, I got an assertion failure on pulse code... Always with some completely non-descriptive description.