Audio suddenly stopped, pulseaudio reinstall has not helped? (14.04)

Solution 1:

For anybody that comes here in the future, there's a much easier solution to this problem as found here. It worked like a charm for me.

cd ~/.config
mv pulse/ pulse.bak/
pulseaudio --start
cp -rp pulse.bak/presets pulse/

You will see a bunch of errors about files in ~/.config/pulse/ not existing which you can ignore when you start pulseaudio. The presets folder will only exist if you have pulseaudio-equalizer installed (and maybe only if you've already set presets). It just stores your presets so it's not a huge deal either way, but it's nice to copy if you've already put work into your custom presets and want to keep them.

Solution 2:

Problem has been solved.

The location of the configuration file (which is altered by pulseaudio-equalizer) in Ubuntu 14.04 is ~/.config/pulse. After deleting this folder, I followed the following steps.

1. I removed any traces of pulseaudio and pulseaudio-equalizer

   sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio pulseaudio-equalizer
   

2. I physically removed any folders viz. /etc/pulse /usr/share/pulseaudio usr/share/pulseaudio-equalizer

3. I performed a reboot

4. I reinstalled pulseaudio and pulseaudio-equalizer (the equalizer install is optional!)

   sudo apt-get install pulseaudio
   sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-equalizer
   

5. Note at this stage you will notice that your 'Ubuntu System Settings' has disappeared. So you have to reinstall the ubuntu desktop.

   sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
   

6. Also, note you can install ubuntu-desktop in the first place instead of pulseaudio because the removal of the latter removes the former and correctly so, the installation of the desktop covers pulseaudio install as well.