No sound from Chrome, sound works fine in Firefox etc (13.10)

Solution 1:

I had the same problem. It ended up being that my system was trying to put Chrome's sound through the HDMI even though the HDMI chord was not plugged in at the time. Presumably, this could happen with any audio output device. The sound settings Ubuntu offers didn't show this nor let me change it for the individual application, but pavucontrol did.

To install pavucontrol from the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

To open pavucontrol from the Terminal:

pavucontrol

Select the "Playback" menu and make sure that you have it set to Show Applications. Now, start playing something from Google Chrome. It will show up there, and it will show what output device is being used for Google Chrome. Make sure it is set to the output device you are trying to use.

Solution 2:

This work for me (Ubuntu 14.04):

killall pulseaudio
rm -r ~/.config/pulse/*
rm -r ~/.pulse*

And reboot.

These commands will stop pulseaudio and remove its current configuration, to start with the defaults again.

Solution 3:

Before wiping out the entire Chrome configuration directory, try this: switch to another audio output device and then switch back to the original one. If you have only one audio device, connect an external one (like HDMI or USB audio) and then perform the above trick.

Update The following seems to prevent the problem from reappearing in the future:

• Edit /etc/pulse/default.pa, find the line that starts with load-module module-stream-restore and add restore_device=false at the end so that the line looks like this:

  load-module module-stream-restore restore_device=false

• Do killall pulseaudio

Solution 4:

I had a similar problem. My laptop had two sound cards, one for built-in audio from the laptop speakers, the other to come through the hdmi output. When I was playing music or something that used the browsers sound, it was channeling the sound through the hdmi channel. From the kmix sound manager, I could see that chrome was listed in the playback streams but if you right clicked on the chrome icon and select move, there was an option to change the audio output for the stream. I made sure it wasn't hdmi, since I wanted the sound to come from my speakers or headphones.