Tags: audio | gnome | ubuntu

Recently I upgraded my install of Ubuntu 11.04 to Gnome Shell. All went ok, but I did notice that I had problems with sounds no longer working. Happily I have now managed to get my audio pumping out again...! I have made a note of the steps I used...

When you have problems like this, the first thing to try is to work out why PulseAudio isn't working properly. The following line will kill PulseAudio and remove the config files. It will then start up PulseAudio in verbose mode. This should tell you why PulseAudio isn't working.

pulseaudio -k ; rm -r ~/.pulse* ; pulseaudio -v

Ctrl-C will let you kill PulseAudio.

To fix Gnome Shell, I found I had to delete any .esd* files in /tmp. You may need to be root for this. Eg:

sudo rm -rf /tmp/.esd*

And do the following to check it works:

pulseaudio -v 

Then I restarted PulseAudio with:

pulseaudio -D

This puts PulseAudio in daemon mode, which I believe is the default for playing sounds. Let the music pump out...!

I found the following LaunchPad url helped me with this : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/352159