I use Ubuntu as my main desktop operating system, together with Gnome Fallback/failsafe, because I dislike Unity and want to keep my Gnome 2 desktop.

This might not be relevant to the problem, but when I upgraded from 14.4 to 16.4, I lost my sound card. When the computer booted, I would get the Ubuntu drums, but once I logged in, the only sound I had came out of my USB headphones. I no longer saw my Intel HDA soundcard listed in the gnome sounds settings.

After a lot of digging I eventually worked out the cause of the problem, and a temporary fix. Long story short, pulseaudio couldn’t detect the sound card, because Ubuntu have changed the way it’s loaded.

You need to therefore reload the detection libraries and restart pulseaudio, run the following command:

pactl load-module module-detect&

Now, I have a startup script that I run as part of my user login to set up my desktop environment and kick of my development environment, so it was enough for me to put this command in that script.

You will probably want to make sure you load this module in your pulseaudio init scripts. Anyway, hope this helps.

5 thoughts on “Ubuntu 16.04 sound fixes for Intel HDA Azalia

  1. Yo dude, this f*cking saved my life on a Dell Precision 7510 on Ubuntu 16.04!
    Been searching for a fix since last kernel update, no t-shirt until I found this article here half an hour ago.
    Give me ma a wallet Address, pls. Will tip 😉

    Keep up the good work, bro. People like you are what makes open source software awesome

  2. Thanx Man!! This worked for me too! New motherboard on existing install of Ubuntu 16.04. New Gigabyte motherboard f2a68hm-h. Amd azalia audio built in. Sound worked fine but not mic listed in sound control applet. I ran the command and bingo! There she was.

    Thank You!

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