Over the past couple of days, the audio on both of my computers stopped working. Not a huge issue, so I mostly ignored it, especially since as soon as I plugged in a USB audio device, everything worked fine.

Then, I broke my USB headset. And it became a problem, because coding without music is like a peanut butter sandwich without milk.

So, I found a delightful page on the Ubuntu Help Pages describing the simple 17-step process for troubleshooting sound issues…complete with all the command line entries necessary. Sighing at the annoyance of going through all this just to get sound, I copied and pasted the first command…completely forgetting that I was already running an APT process in the background…which caused most of the command to fail.

Especially the last bit, which was supposed to shut off pulseaudio. It said pulseaudio wasn’t running. Which prompted me to simply run pulseaudio from the command line…fixing my problem. I added an entry to start pulseaudio on startup, and I was good.

As it turns out, when I uninstalled the pulseaudio-equalizer plugin, the entry for pulseaudio got removed from startup. I had originally installed this on both of my computers, and later uninstalled it after it was causing issues for my headset.