How to fix "No Soundcards Found"

I was trying to get IEC958/SPDIF optical out working on my ASUS P8P67PRO V3 motherboard running Natty and I seem to have wiped out a crucial part of my sound setup.

Here is the output from some relevant commands (I hope):

sudo aplay -l  
aplay: device_list:240: no soundcards found...

ls /cat/asound*
ls: cannot access /proc/asoun*: No such file or directory

lspci -v
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8469
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
Memory at fe720000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: oss_hdaudio
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel

pactl stat
Currently in use: 1 blocks containing 63.9 KiB bytes total.
Allocated during whole lifetime: 41 blocks containing 1.8 MiB bytes total.
Sample cache size: 0 B
Server Name: pulseaudio
Server Version: 0.9.22-24-g67d18
Default Sample Specification: s16le 2ch 44100Hz
Default Channel Map: front-left,front-right
Default Sink: auto_null
Default Source: auto_null.monitor
Cookie: bed7e0b0

Any advice greatly appreciated.

I had the same problem. I solved it by running the following command

sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel

Inside a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T to open one).

Basic Troubleshooting Steps

1. Is your volume turned all the way down, or is your speaker muted?

   Run the following command in terminal:

   $ pacmd
   
   Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information.
   >>> list-sinks
   

2. Can you play a sound that is known to always play correctly?

   Run the following command in terminal:

   aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
   

   If you are not a root user then:

   sudo aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
   

3. Can another user play one of these "known-good" sounds?

   Log in with another user account. If there are no others, you should create one with default settings.

4. Is the system recognizing your sound card?

   Run the command in the terminal:

   sudo aplay -l
   

   The output of that command should look something like this:

   **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
   
   card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC861VD Analog [ALC861VD Analog]
     Subdevices: 0/1
     Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
   

   If you see this:

   aplay: device_list:221: no soundcard found...
   

   that means that Ubuntu is not recognizing your sound card. Check that you have the proper modules installed.

   Then in terminal run the following command:

   sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel
   

   Now run the command:

   sudo aplay -l
   

   and see whether you are getting the list of hardware devices.

5. Do you have the sound modules installed?

   Open a terminal and type (note the backticks ` for command substitution):

   find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd
   

   You should see a large list of items come up. If you don't, it means that the install process did not install the sound modules for you. To fix this, type in the terminal window:

   sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` linux-generic
   

   After installing the modules, you will need to reboot for the changes to take effect.

6. Is the sound card physically installed and recognized by your hardware?

   Open a terminal and type:

   lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio"
   

   This should output some information about your audio hardware. An example is below:

   00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
           Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device ff01
           Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
           Memory at dc440000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
           Capabilities: <access denied>
           Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
           Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
   

This should resolve the sound issue in Ubuntu.

In case it helps anyone, I had a similar problem: Alsa was finding my USB soundcard, but Pulseaudio was not.

Turns out that if I changed my user to root (sudo su root), then Pulseaudio worked fine. So the solution was giving the correct 'audio' permission to my user:

sudo adduser myuser audio

All the above steps didn't solve the issue for me on Zesty 17.04, unfortunately. But I could activate the soundcard with:

sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel

That was already a good starting point.

Thus I could fix it that way:

1. Create a file called soundcardfix in /etc/init.d.

2. Fill the file with these two lines of code:

   #!/bin/bash
   /sbin/modprobe snd-hda-intel
   

3. Enter this command in a terminal:

   sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/soundcardfix
   

4. Finally create symbolic links with these two commands in a terminal:

   sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/soundcardfix /etc/rc3.d/S02soundcardfix
   sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/soundcardfix /etc/rc5.d/S02soundcardfix
   

I hope it will help somehow. :)