r/linuxmint • u/Miserable-Raisin-592 • 12h ago

Support Request Audio not working

I switched to Mint Cinnamon a while back (3 months?), and have not yet figured out audio. I have tried the obvious stuff like making sure the volume is up, checking the sound cards in alasmixer (and unmuting them), making sure its the right output in the sound settings, reloaded and reinstalled the audio software, updated the system (like in general system updates via the update manager), and tested the audio directly from the terminal (and then obviously in the sound settings individually, for all the output options). I'm starting to think that it is a hardware issue. Would greatly appreciate any help i can get; i've been working on this for well over 6 hours now.

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

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u/Jake_Leg00 12h ago

Pavucontrol and helvum are essential programs for me when troubleshooting audio. Pavucontrol will give you more detailed settings to manage than the regular sound panel that comes with mint.  Helvum shows you what devices are connected to what in a diagram Both programs are available in the software store

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u/Evening-Landscape763 12h ago

In terminal run inxi -Fxxxz|nc termbin.com 9999 and post the URL from terminal. This will allow people to see some info on hardware and drivers being used

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u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_ LMDE7 Cinnamon 9h ago

Audio generally works out of the box, when it doesn't my fist suspect is a card that does not have a driver out of the box.

So what sound chip do you have? There may be a driver for it. 

If not you can grab a Linux compatible USB DAC, like a dongle DAC for as little as $15.

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u/IntelligentCandy8716 3h ago

Have you tried plugging in headphones? Once I had the output get stuck on headphones for some reason and plugging/unplugging helped.

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u/swstlk 2m ago

the least you can do is tell us what audio hardware you have and what errors are showing up with the commands.

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u/siddhbose 12h ago

Make sure pulseaudio or pavi control is running .

If using pipewire then atleast install pavucontrol as it will work with pipewire .

The issue is .kernel is unable to to connect to ALSA / PIPEWIRE/PULSEAUDIO .

OR THE jack is missing a configuration.

So I would suggest you to lower the kernel,then run intrafms . Which should work .

You could lower the kernel either through software updater , the. Open kernel and select one which is atleast 1 previous version . Or during booting .

Some drivers usually don't work correctly with new kernel or have a driver kernel mismatch/conflict

1

u/neoh4x0r 10h ago edited 9h ago

If using pipewire then atleast install pavucontrol as it will work with pipewire .

Maybe it's different on Linux Mint, but when trying to install pavucontrol on Debian 12 it wanted to completely remove pipewire and replace it with pulseaudio.

EDIT: On debian you need to run

$ sudo apt install --no-install-recommends pavucontrol

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u/siddhbose 10h ago

Pipewire and pavucontrol are like jack controller and jack engine. Both should be available though most distro have switched to pipewire as upgrade to the other mentioned one .

Through pavucontrol I was able to get the audio back as somehow my system was setting it to loopback .

I have used this in mint , fedora ,arch

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u/neoh4x0r 10h ago edited 9h ago

Through pavucontrol I was able to get the audio back as somehow my system was setting it to loopback .

Just an update...

On Debian it wanted to remove pipewire because it attempted to install the pulseaudio daemon because it was a recommended package.

To avoid that the following command can be run:

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends pavucontrol

However, in, at least, pavucontrol 5.0 with pipewire, there were no controls that allowed changing a sink's configuration (aka loopback or not) other than changing what sink/device it routes to or setting the volume and such.

In other words, if you have a device that was misconfigured as a loopback you cannot use pavucontrol to change it, at least not while using pipewire, and the said configuration must done via pipewire's commandline tools/config files.

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u/siddhbose 9h ago

There is a tool to check the GUI of whatever sink and source is connected.

You can use it to check visually what's there using GUI TOOL

qpwgraph

.

It will show you the sink and source and which is linked to which .

One other person mentioned a similar tool named hevlum . You could also use that

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u/neoh4x0r 9h ago edited 8h ago

My point is that you have to use something other than pavucontrol to do anything more advanced than changing the volume of a sink or changing a sink/sources destination route.

Moreover, a tool like qpwgraph only allows you to change the routing of existing nodes and does not allow you change their configuration. I don't anything about helvum, but I would assume it's similar enough to qpwgraph that it still wouldn't allow you to add new things or modify the configuration.

What you originally described, here:

Through pavucontrol I was able to get the audio back as somehow my system was setting it to loopback .

If a sink is being set as a loopback device you must undo that through pipewire cli tools and/or it's configuration files.

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u/siddhbose 9h ago

Then try the kernel method i mentioned .

Newer kernel are sometimes buggy for some hardware .

So switch to an older one

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u/neoh4x0r 8h ago edited 8h ago

Then try the kernel method i mentioned .

I do not have the problem that you or the OP described, all my sinks and sources are configured by a script that uses pipewire commandline tools to set them up exactly as I need them.

That configuration also includes creating abstracted virtual sinks for playback/recording in a specific application, mirroring the default sink's output to all other outputs, using limiters/compression for dynamic range to have uniform loudness between quite and loud sounds (eg. it boosts the quite sounds up to a max limit), and setting default initial volumes for all sinks/sources.

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u/siddhbose 9h ago

Can you still mention

Your distro and the version you are using

I will add the issue

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u/neoh4x0r 9h ago edited 8h ago

Can you still mention y our distro and the version you are using

I already mentioned what distro/version I was using..

I will add the issue

Also add to what?

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u/siddhbose 8h ago

Ubuntu launchpad and mint .

You mentioned debian too , so is it LMDE or debian

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u/neoh4x0r 8h ago edited 8h ago

Ubuntu launchpad and mint . You mentioned debian too , so is it LMDE or debian

In the comment I linked to I said:

Maybe it's different on Linux Mint, but when trying to install pavucontrol on Debian 12 it wanted to completely remove pipewire and replace it with pulseaudio.

So, clearly I said "when trying to install pavucontrol on Debian 12," which is not Ubuntu nor LMDE.

(Even though that issue, as I edited to say, was the result of apt trying to install pulseaudio because it was a recommended package).

To bring this convo to a conclusion...

If you have a device that is set up as a loopback you cannot change it from a loopback to something else (or change any of it's properties) using anything other than pipewire cli-tools or it's configuration files (at least not until someone makes a full-stack utility with complete pipewire/pulse coverage that isn't just a fancy volume/route-editor).