Ubuntu 14.04 sound suddenly stopped working, reboot did not fix

I am running Ubuntu 14.04 on an ASUS X52J laptop.

I was watching a lecture on Google Chrome, when suddenly, all sound was lost. Throughout the PC. No sounds from Chrome (even though Chrome indicates it does play sound). No sounds from VLC, and no sounds from pulseaudio's sound tests.

I've tried:

• Restarting pulseaudio via pulseaudio --kill.
• Reloading ALSA via alsa reload and alsa force-reload.
• Checking the ALSA mixer via alsamixer, nothing out of the ordinary.
• Restart my PC. Did not help, didn't even hear the drum sound on startup.
• mved my ~/.config/pulse file away and killed pulseaudio again.
• pacmd list-sinks | grep muted indicates that nothing is muted.

I'm not sure what to do anymore. Could this be a hardware problem? Is there anything I haven't tried yet?

Output of aplay -l:

madara@Madara-PC:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 0: CONEXANT Analog [CONEXANT Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Ubuntu wiki » PulseAudio » Resetting User Configuration:

For some reason, pulseaudio's user configuration files can become corrupt(unsynced?) in some way, and deleting them (and forcing fresh ones to be generated) fixes a no sound condition. After using the command below, log out/in.

Ubuntu 12.10/Quantal (and earlier)

rm --recursive ~/.pulse*; pulseaudio --kill

Ubuntu 13.04/Raring (and later)

rm --recursive ~/.config/pulse; pulseaudio --kill

Please try the following:

Fix Alternative #1

Try reinstalling Alsa and Pulse audio in the following manner:

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio

sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio

And force reload Alsa again:

sudo alsa force-reload

Fix Alternative #2

Open the terminal and edit speech-dispatcher file by using the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/default/speech-dispatcher

In here, change RUN=yes to RUN=no

Reboot.

Let me know if it have worked for you.

Source: It's FOSS

I have Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I tried everything that was ever recommended online, I was only able to fix my PC sound issue by running the following commands:

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

Some directories may not exist, that is OK.

then:

pulseaudio -k

then reboot

I found this solution here, there are also some other recommended solutions if this doesn't work.

The current existing answers did not resolve the issue for me. It turned out the fix was much simpler in my case. I simply ran:

killall jackd

That's everything I needed to get audio working after restarting Alsa and PulseAudio for the last time.

If it still won't work, then you maybe really need to:

• Clean the configuration files and/or;
• Reinstall Alsa and PulseAudio.

If the existing answers did not fix the issue, you might want to try this simple fix. It might work for you and fix your issue much more quickly.