Sound troubleshooting

No sound is one of the most typical hardware issues of openSUSE desktop.

No sound device

If your system cannot detect any sound device and you cannot change volume, try these methods.

Restart PulseAudio service

Most sound cards are compatible with openSUSE. If your system cannot recognize sound devices, there is probably a failure in PulseAudio, the sound back-end of openSUSE. You can restart PulseAudio with the following commands.

If pulseaudio is already running:

pulseaudio -k

If pulseaudio is not running:

pulseaudio -D

You do not need to restart system. If it is pulseaudio's problem, your sound should come back immediately.

YaST Sound

Open YaST > Sound.

You should see all sound cards in your machine. If you didn't see any, you probably have incompatible or broken sound cards.

Delete all soundcards. One soundcard will remain if it is correctly recognized by the kernel. Now you click on "Edit" -> "Normal Setup". There you can play a test sound. This will prove you did the cabling and volume settings right. Now you start

speaker-test

speaker-test is supposed to play noise as a speaker test.

If this does not help, run

udevadm trigger

to re-populate your sound devices in /dev/snd. Then run

speaker-test

If this does not help follow SDB:Intel-HDA_sound_problems

Run a different system

Run a Live CD of openSUSE or other Linux distributions. Or if you have Windows or macOS on the same machine, try them. If sound works on other systems, then your system installation must have some problem. Otherwise, your sound card hardware might be broken.

Plug a USB speaker or headphone

USB speakers and headphones have built in sound card. If they are working with your computer, it seems that your system installation is okay but your sound card is either incompatible or broken.

Sound device no output

If you can see sound devices and change volume, but speaker or headphone don't have output, you might need to configure your sound devices.

Configure sound devices in KDE

In KDE, open System Settings > Multimedia > Sound & Volume.

In Devices tab, you can find all sound devices that are being used. When you have multiple sound cards, make sure your first choice is set as default.

In Advanced tab, you can enable and disable sound devices, or change their configuration. Make sure your desired sound device is enabled and properly configured.

Configure sound devices in GNOME

TODO.

Application no sound

If only one or some applications don't have sound output, you could try:

Change volume in application

Music and video players usually have their own sound volume control. Try to increase to maximum.

Change volume and output device in system

You can also control applications' volume in system volume control (normally in system tray). In addition, PulseAudio allows you to choose a sound device for each application. Make sure application is using the right device as output.

In KDE, open System Settings > Multimedia > Sound & Volume > Applications.

In GNOME, ...