Ubuntu: Up and Running

PulseAudio

The standard sound server in Ubuntu is PulseAudio, a background process that takes input from multiple sources, processes it, and outputs it to multiple sound cards, servers, or other processes. The idea is to allow all audio streams to integrate seamlessly with each other to provide crystal-clear sound, no matter how the input streams are combined.

Although it’s not essential to have it installed in order to play sound, PulseAudio features, among many other things, per-application volume controls, compatibility with most popular audio applications, and high-quality resampling, and it even handles network audio. So it’s a very useful and powerful program to have installed.

However, there have been reports of sound problems on certain setups, such as scratchy sound and random pops, or even no sound at all. So if you’ve tried everything else and still can’t get the sound to work correctly in Ubuntu, you may be able to solve the problem by uninstalling PulseAudio.

To do this, make sure that you do not have Synaptic running, and then open a Terminal window by selecting Applications → Accessories → Terminal. Then enter the following, providing your password when asked:

sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

Hopefully the issue will now be solved, but you may still wish to try reinstalling a future release of PulseAudio (which may now work for you) in order to gain use of the features it offers. To do this, you would enter the following from a Terminal window prompt:

sudo apt-get install ...