No sound with Thunderbird 12.0.1

I have installed Ubuntu 12.04 and Thunderbird 12.0.1 from scratch but I hear no sound when new mail arrives.

I have installed pulseaudio-esound-compat and esound-common but the problem persist.

How can I fix this, and get new mail notification sounds in Thunderbird?

Bug reported here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1009108

Solution 1:

I was having a similar issue in Ubuntu 12.04 with Thunderbird 12.0.1. At least in my case, the origin of the problem was two-fold:

1. the option "Default system sound for new mail" works only if sound effects are enabled in Ubuntu. If you want Thunderbird to play the default system sound from the Ubuntu theme, but do not want to enable the sound effects, just provide this path /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/message.ogg in the option "Use the following sound file".

2. whenever you change the path to the sound file, it is crucial to restart Thunderbird, otherwise it plays no sound at all.

My suggestion is therefore to select the sound file manually and restart Thunderbird. If it still doesn't work, I think you should file a bug report in launchpad, see here how. This might be a possible duplicate of this very old bug.

Note that the "Choose sound" menu has an hard-coded filter for wav files. In order to select an ogg file you'll have to specify the location explicitly by clicking on the pencil icon and providing the sound file location.

Solution 2:

In my case the problem was not triggered by missing packages nor by missing Thunderbird configuration parameters nor by ogg or wav problems, the only thing I had to do to solve my issue was:

Ubuntu Menu (top right) --> System Settings --> Hardware: Sound --> Sound Effects --> Alert Volume --> Slide full to right (100%)

Then Thunderbird began to play wonderful notification sounds when new mails arrived. Hope this helps some of You, too.

Solution 3:

From Thunderbird v12, it uses libcanberra. And the canberra system only plays the sounds if sound effects are enabled: For default sound and for a custom sound.
IMHO this behavior is incorrect but this is what Mozilla have decided.

You can install libcanberra from the Software Center , or by opening a Terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and running these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gstreamer

Solution 4:

As for the home folder question, it is a matter of white space. In my situation (plain up to date Ubuntu 12.04, Thunderbird 13.0.1), a notification wav sound does not work if either the path (like My Music), either the file name (like You’ve got mail.wav) contains a space. It does work otherwise (not only from the home folder). Before trying every esound, pulseaudio, libcanberra or whatever, make sure the path and file name contain no space.