Audio busted all of a sudden

[pendrachken]

Looks like a lot of dbus churn in that one upgrade log that was posted. That's where I would look, Pulse can be connected through dbus ( no idea if it is by default, I typically don't use sound in my VMs ) and that may have been broken in the latest dbus builds.

You will have to look into if Debian uses dbus with Pulse, if the configs got borked if the do, and try to get the configs working again if they need to be edited.

Other than that, it sounds like the other possibility is that the system is not redirecting sound properly to the default card for some reason, this could be due to Pulse / ALSA / or even the kernel or HDA Intel driver settings ( you will have to look these up, there are a ton of different driver options for making different hardware play nice )

[sunrat]

The joys of using unstable.
I just attempted a full-upgrade of my Sid system and got this:

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The following packages will be REMOVED:
  kdemultimedia paprefs plasma-pa pulseaudio-module-gconf

Maybe it has something to do with the issue.

I have KDE Plasma 5 DE. Sound still works after upgrade. Here kmix was automatically installed and works now to adjust volume. pavucontrol no longer works.
If you use a DE other than KDE, try using a different audio mixer control until the relevant PulseAudio packages are available again.

See also here - https://forum.siduction.org/index.php?topic=7217.0 . siduction forum is good to check for upgrade warning before any upgrade.

[barlafuss]

my issue was solved removing my user and timidity from audio group

[Serenity]

Well it seems I have my answer, it's a bug in TiMidity of all things. The new version takes control of the sound chip before PulseAudio can, effectively locking it out. So I used "systemctl stop timidity" followed by "pulseaudio -k" and wouldn't you know it? Fully restored sound. I'd advise everyone else to try the same to see if you're being affected by this too.

[xendistar]

Well it seems I have my answer, it's a bug in TiMidity of all things. The new version takes control of the sound chip before PulseAudio can, effectively locking it out. So I used "systemctl stop timidity" followed by "pulseaudio -k" and wouldn't you know it? Fully restored sound. I'd advise everyone else to try the same to see if you're being affected by this too.

Thanks Serenity, good work.

Simply removed Timidty and now sound works

[sunrat]

What an annoying bug! You could probably just do

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systemctl stop timidity.service
systemctl disable timidity.service

That way you could enable and start it again once the bug gets fixed.
Of course removing timidity is fine if you never want to play midi files.

[phanousk]

The same with me - latest debian testing/sid. All soundcards were visible and functional (headset for example) in PulseAudio except the internal one. 'aplay -l' listed all cards including the internal but when I've tried to use it, I encountered the "audio open error: Device or resource busy". After uninstalling 'timidity' everything went OK.

[Serenity]

Problem is fully solved for me now. The latest TiMidity update claims to fix the bug, and while I do not understand how it's been fixed, I have installed the new version, started TiMidity and played some MIDI files with it. Both PulseAudio and TiMidity are working fine together now.

[pierrecdn]

Many thanks for that. Got some updates this night through unattended-upgrades.
This destroyed a part of my morning searching why I suddenly had no sound, I should come here more often.

[sunrat]

The pulseaudio issues I mentioned above are now over in Sid with the latest full-upgrade. Also a nice shiny new Plasma 5.13 has appeared.