System Sounds missing / not working

Yesterday I lost all my system sounds after a new install (done as an upgrade ) of Mint Sarah.

Actually it had been lost in 17.3 and I had done the upgrade after screwing it up there while trying to change the sound inputs to accept a 5.1 surround sound system. I had hoped with the new Kernel it would fix it.

Lot's of complicated advice out there for this issue and ideas for fault finding.

Turns out all I had to do was open Synaptic Package manager and search for libcanberra-pulse, it was not installed so I ticked it and applied the change. Voila I now have desktop sounds again.


Incidentally the issued with the Creative 5.1 surround sound system was a fixed to an extent,  after screwing everything up by following several different fixes first.

My internal sound card on the motherboard  has three, three-pin phono input/outputs.

My Sub woofer was connected to PINK (mic) connection nearest the board.
Next to that was FRONT connecting to the middle LIME (line-out).
Finally REAR was connected to LIGHT BLUE (line-in).

With these connections set up correctly from the manual's of both the ASROCK 960GM motherboard and the CREATIVE Inspire T6300 surround sound system it was just the software to tackle.

It seems like you have to change the options in the /etc/modprobe.d folder. there can be found the text file alsa-base.conf

By changing (as root) and adding the yellow highlighted line to the file I seem to have made the sound chip on the motherboard's connection be recognised as an analogue 3 pin phono connector thus enabling it to send the correct signals out and not expecting a microphone signal in and line in to be received.

# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0
options snd_hda_intel model=3stack
options bt87x index=-2
options cx88_alsa index=-2
options saa7134-alsa index=-2
options snd-atiixp-modem index=-2
options snd-intel8x0m index=-2
options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2
options snd-usb-audio index=-2
options snd-usb-caiaq index=-2
options snd-usb-ua101 index=-2
options snd-usb-us122l index=-2
options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2


I still have some work to do on this as I'm not sure if everything is working OK but I am getting there.

Finally I checked that the option of 5.1 was now there in the sound options of the control panel and moved the option from 2 channel stereo to 5.1 stereo.

I also checked alsamixer from the Terminal which seemed to only show the first 5 channel volume options by moving across with the right arrow the other options appeared from the edge of the screen to check also. I made sure the correct options for volume were set here also.

Thats where I'm up to.