The www has failed me with this, so I'm trying you guys. Sound worked great out of the box when I installed 7.2... Yay! I could watch all kinds of videos, like on facebook and youtube. And I could listen to most podcasts too. But then something happened. It was either a kernel upgrade or that I installed vlc (for watching videos on DVD) and the whole stack of codecs for it... I don't know exactly when, but at some point I no longer had sound with youtube and other web videos. The videos played fine, just no sound. Note that using vlc, both video and the audio with it play just fine. I need to select the audio driver (from a list in a vlc menu), however, else the sound won't work in vlc either.
If I go into the Applications menu, then System Tools -> Settings -> Sound, under "Choose a device for sound output:" there are no devices listed. There used to be.
If I run "aplayer file.wav", nothing plays (no sound at all) and I get the error "main:786: audio open error: No such file or directory". If, on the other hand, I run "aplay file.wav -D plughw:0" (i.e., specify the/a device), I do get sound, the file does play.
I ran alsa-info.sh and it posted tons of info from it on my setup at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=1dba91886be054df4816000768a0f5b109947a48. Yet it still doesn't tell me what's missing.
Anyone here have an idea...? or thoughts about where to look next?
tia, ken