No sound on arm ubuntu 20.04

Solution 1:

I had this problem when updating to Ubuntu 20.04 This silly update change my hardware to an unexisting one !!Crazy. Easy way to fix it: install pavucontrol. Maximize the window of pavucontrol.In the last panel, you can choose your hardware. Launch a video with sound on youtube. Try the proposed hardwares on pavucontrol step by step until you hear a sound.

Solution 2:

I was also having trouble with the sound after upgrading to 20.04. My first advice would be to not trust the test sound output feature in gnome-settings. Pressing the "test" button, which is supposed to make some noise on the speaker, won't just do anything.

So through the trouble shooting process, you'd need to have an audio file to test your sound outputs. For me, speaker-test was very convenient for this purpose.

Here's the troubleshooting process I went through.

1. Test the current situation with default output.

   $ speaker-test
   

2. See other available sound outputs.

   $ aplay -l
   

3. Pick other outputs then try them.

   $ speaker-test -D hw:<card id>,<device id>
   

   For example, if the output of aplay contains a line

   card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
   

   Then the command to try this output will be

   $ speaker-test -D hw:1,7
   

4. Kill all pulse audio daemons to prevent them from interfering during the troubleshooting.

   $ mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/pulse_old  # Remove potentially corrupted pulse files
   $ sudo killall pulseaudio
   

5. Try step 1, 2, and 3 again.

6. Check dmesg and journalctl to see if any errors regarding the sound are reported.