How To Fix Sound Issues in Ubuntu 9.10

Many users have had problems with audio upon upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. This How-To will show you how to fix some of those audio issues, including:

• No audio in Flash videos.
• Audio stops entirely after opening a Flash video.
• No audio at all.
• Audio plays out of speakers but not headphones plugged into the front of the computer (go to step 5).

Quick Ubuntu Audio Primer

By default, Ubuntu 9.10 uses two complementary programs to pump sound through your speakers or headphones.

1. ALSA
   The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) provides direct access to your sound card.
   One issue with ALSA is that only one program can output sound to ALSA at one time. Because of this, Ubuntu includes a second program called…
2. PulseAudio
   PulseAudio is a sound server that takes audio data from all of your applications and passes it onto ALSA.
   PulseAudio lets you do some cool things like control the volume level of each application separately, and stream audio to another computer over a network.

A common problem in Ubuntu 9.10 occurs when an application attempts to use ALSA directly, instead of going through PulseAudio as it should. The following steps will solve that problem.

Step 1: Install some utilities

In this step, we will install the Gnome ALSA Mixer and the Default Sound Chooser.

To install the Gnome ALSA Mixer, open a terminal and type in:

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

Installing the Default Sound Chooser is a bit more complicated. It used to be in the alsa-utils package, but it was removed in Ubuntu 9.10. Luckily, a helpful Ubuntu forum user has provided directions to install this utility.

1. Download an old version of alsa-utils (make sure you choose the correct architecture: i386 for a 32-bit system and amd64 for a 64-bit system).
2. Open a terminal window.
3. Navigate to the directory that you saved the .deb file in.
4. Perform the following commands:

# Install the .deb
sudo dpkg -i alsa-utils_1.0.18-1ubuntu11*.deb
# Copy asoundconf
sudo cp /usr/bin/asoundconf /usr/
# Install the graphical front-end to the Default Sound Card chooser
sudo apt-get install asoundconf-gtk
# Update alsa-utils now that you have asoundconf copied
sudo apt-get upgrade alsa-utils
# Move asoundconf to the right place
sudo mv /usr/asoundconf /usr/bin/

At this point you should now have a utility called Default Sound Card in System > Preferences.

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