Background

If you have HDMI as an output option and tried to install a new/fresh distro you may have ran across an issue where you cannot get audio to work over the HDMI output (e.g. no sound going to your TV/monitor speakers). I have battled this issue for a few years before coming across a rather simple solution. I’m not a PulseAudio fan but it did solve the problem.

Details

You can solve this problem with PulseAudio by setting the “Card Profile”. This can be accomplished through a GUI or CLI.

First, install pavucontrol (apt-get install pavucontrol).

Fix via GUI

Now we can use pavucontrol to change the output profile:

• start pavucontrol
• go to the “Configuration” tab
• select “Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output” from the Profile list

Your sound should now work over your HDMI interface.

You can find more information about this process and pavucontrol at maketecheasier.

Fix via CLI

As with the GUI approach above, you want to activate the Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output profile for the card in question. First you need to find your card (index) and then the profile (name). To do so, issue the following command:

• pacmd list-cards note: if you get “No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon.” then you need to start PulseAudio (start-pulseaudio-x11)
• take note of the index of the Card you want to use
• take note of the Profile that corresponds next to the line with “Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output + Analog Stereo Input”
• take note of the active profile (in case you want to switch back to it)
• issue the following command to switch to the profile you want: pacmd {index} {profile-name} (replacing {index} with the index you found above and {profile-name} from the Profile above
  • For example, I have one card (index=1) and the profile I want is output:hdmi-stereo+input:analog-stereo so the syntax would be pacmd set-card-profile 0 output:hdmi-stereo+input:analog-stereo
• test the output with: aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
  • note: you can also use aplay -l to list all of your playback devices and then test hdmi audio output with aplay -D plughw:0,3 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav_

If you want to switch back simply use pacmd set-card-profile 0 (enter your previous profile name).