[Nottingham] Intermittent sound on Ubuntu 16.04

[Jason Irwin]

On 19/07/18 11:45, stripes theotoky via Nottingham wrote:
> Have worked though the first two steps in this with no effect.
> About to start working on step 3 but in if anyone has any better ideas they would be most welcome.

Step 1 is refreshing the Pulse install. Seems sensible.
Step 2 is....what now? WTF does Terminal scrolling history got to do with sound?
Step 3 is downloading a random script off the Internet. Nope, I'm out.

I guess the question is: hardware or software?

When there is no sound coming out, does anything show sound still being generated? e.g. monitoring volume levels?
If they're bouncing around, I would suspect a hardware problem. With it being a laptop, it could be a wire or something has worked loose and then intermittently breaks connection. e.g. as the laptop warms up or gets flexed.
And in that scenario, I think it would be between the speakers and the sound unit/MoBo jack.

Oh, with it being a laptop; is it incorrectly switching to headphones? Next time it fails, plug a pair in and see if you hear anything.
That could mean an accidental key-combo or a speaker fault as described above.

Does the loss of sound seem to correlate with a particular action (e.g. application start-up, system event)
Have you checked the log files for any error messages or other info? Is PA reporting "FATAL: Where the heck did '/dev/audio0' go???"

In the past (circa Ubuntu 10/12) Pulseaudio/Gnome would get into a punch-up and the only way I could resolve it was via "pavucontrol".
Although those issues were permanent rather than intermittent.

The other article (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting) contains some steps that might help isolate the issue (esp. when sound appears to have failed)

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