Debugging Audio Issues
A set of steps that users can run to gather technical details which may make it easier and faster for volunteers to debug their issues.
Target issues
- Audio not working at all
- Previously audio used to work but no longer does
- Quality of audio playback is poor
Guidelines
This is a troubleshooting plan to gather relevant diagnostic information about your audio issues. The steps go from basic to more detailed information gathering.
- Search for existing threads in the support and help category category, perhaps refine that to audio-and-video tagged threads.
- Start a new topic in another tab.
- Open the collapsed “⯈Details” switch below.
- Run the commands, then paste the results of these commands separately, in your new topic.
Surround the text with three backticks “````” to format it for best readibility.
```
like this
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Note: For many reasons, we prefer plain text over photographs of the screen, but appreciate that sometimes a system is so broken that it’s the only option. If that’s the case, please make effort to take clear, un-blurry, readable images.
Debugging sound issues
There’s a lot here. Feel free to put each response inside its own set of backticks, to keep them apart.
First, basic system information:
uname -a
lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio"
aplay -l
pactl info
Next, check for recent system updates that might have affected audio:
grep "install" /var/log/dpkg.log | tail -n 50
Check if PipeWire / PulseAudio is actually running:
systemctl --user status pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber
For real-time audio diagnostics:
pactl info
pactl list short sinks
pactl list | grep -A2 'State\|Name\|Volume\|Mute'
To check for audio-related errors:
journalctl -p 3 -xb | grep -i "pulse\|audio\|alsa"
sudo dmesg | grep -i "audio\|sound\|pulse\|alsa"
Let’s also check current audio settings and devices:
pw-cli ls
pacmd list-sinks
For system load that might affect audio:
top -b -n 1 | head -n 20