DebuggingSoundProblems

Debugging Central

This page is part of the debugging series — pages with debugging details for a variety of Ubuntu packages.

Preliminary checks before filing a bug report

  • Before filing a bug report, please check on the following:
  • Is your sound system plugged in and switched on? I spent an hour trying to diagnose a sound issue when the problem was that I had switched off the speakers to answer a phone call and forgot that I had done so. Sad :-(

  • Is your speaker or microphone muted? Check here:

How to report audio bugs

Please do not report general problems on this page; use the normal support channels instead. For more on this, please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support.

If you have found a software bug, please report it by via the following terminal command:

ubuntu-bug -s audio

This will submit a detailed bug report with necessary information about your current system.

If the above fails for some reason, you may file a bug report, then upload alsa-info information according to these instructions.

Things to specify in your bug report

First, should you ever need to do anything in this section for your sound to work in a brand new installation you should report a bug.

  1. For mixer problems, you may control the mixers at ALSA level.

  2. A hardware enablement or regression bug may have been fixed upstream. Hence, please test the latest snapshot of upgrading your ALSA drivers, mention which version specifically you tested, if this resolves your problem.

  3. If your problem is audio crackling, glitching, or breaking up, and it is hardware specific, you can try applying a position fix quirk.

  4. Using very new hardware? Here's how to check whether your built-in sound card has driver support.

Triaging sound bugs

In general, no-sound/low-sound/headphone-no-sound/no auto-mute/etc. bugs should be:

  • Filed against the linux source package.

  • Add the kernel-sound tag

  • Subscribe (do not assign) the Ubuntu-audio team (not the ubuntu-audio-dev team)

Only assign bugs to the "alsa-driver" source package if the reporter is using the alsa-source binary package with module-assistant OR is requesting a blacklist or slots/index modification.

  • Do not mark bugs as duplicates unless you're 100% sure that both the hardware, software, and symptom match exactly. Slightly different hardware very often requires slightly different fixes. If in doubt, file a new bug.

Here's an article of how to determine whether you have the same hardware as the original bug reporter.

Further Information

The Ubuntu Audio Developer's team maintains a set of Audio relevant wiki pages here.


CategoryDocumentation CategoryBugSquad CategoryDebugging

DebuggingSoundProblems (last edited 2014-07-26 11:08:14 by penalvch)