DEV Community

Cover image for Fix audio errors in Ubuntu 18.04 with alsamixer
Shubhkirti Sharma
Shubhkirti Sharma

Posted on

Fix audio errors in Ubuntu 18.04 with alsamixer

Recently I installed Ubuntu 18.04 on my laptop having an SSD and an internal HDD. Soon after fixing a lot of issues, I encountered through this one and thought maybe a lot of people are going through this. So,why not write about it?

Sound panel in Ubuntu 18.04

Sometimes it happens that all the audio controls and volume are full and you stilll don't hear any volume coming out of those speakers. I researched a lot and found out that there maybe a problem with the mixer control. And here is what I found out. I ran alsamixer in terminal and checked if all the volumes are full or not.

Alsamixer

The 'Headphone' volume was mute even though the 'Master' one was full. And this small thing was the issue. The fix? Simple use arrow keys (left/right) to highlight the headphones tab (it turns red as master is in the above photo). Then use arrow keys(up/down) to increase/decrease the volume. Exit the interface by tapping the Esc key.

You can also use the terminal commands to adjust the volume:

amixer set Headphone 50%

amixer set Master 80%
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Command Line Editing

This finally helped me figure out the issue with the audio. If this does not work, let's just discuss what might be happening!

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
jare11234 profile image
jare11234

Hi Shubhkirti,
I appreciate you article "Fix audio errors in Ubuntu 18.04 with alsamixer". I tried your solution, but in the process I observed my headphone "Headphone set at zero [dB gain: -64.00, -64.00]" input flicks to full scale as the noise occurs. Placing all other values at 100 seams to reduce the effect, however it is obvious in the alasmixer v1.1.3 on the gui Headphone input. I don't think this is a hardware problem, more likely a software update. I have a Clonezilla backup, and could re-install the last known good configuration, 11 days ago, but I would prefer to wait for feedback. I have tried 1 other solutions, 1)power-save. Thus far your solution offers the most improvement. Thank you Jeff