no sound for user, had been working, works for other users

[jeffz]

Sound has stopped working on my laptop for my main/only user. It had previously been doing just fine, but either system updates or some configuration change has caused audio to simply not come out of the system's internal speakers or headphones when plugged in. No signs of audio-related errors, no indication in GNOME that audio shouldn't be coming out (i.e. nothing looks muted).

I saw another sound-related post in which the poster noted that he got sound working on his machine by deleting and re-creating his user. Amazingly, this works for me. I can create a fresh user account and sound works just fine.

I do not want to recreate my user account. Can someone point out what it is about the user that may be "damaged" in terms of sound configuration?

Thanks,
Jeff

[sea]

If its on a laptop/netbook, is there a chance that you accidently hit the key combination to mute the sound?
That is not always shown in the volume icon.

Further, if you go the the menu, multimeida, is there something like the ALSA-Mixer?
I had once an issue with it, as it droped to 0, while the volume level was to the max but no sound was to hear.

If none of the above applies, whats the output of:

for e in sound media;do dmesg|grep $e;done

[jeffz]

I have resolved this. It wasn't muted, but rather the alternate HDMI output was selected instead of the normal analog output. I only determined this by comparing the Sound control panel contents between the new user and my primary user.

I have no idea how or why this changed. I also noticed that my gnome shell extensions were all turned off since the last time I had logged in (and sound had worked). Where are these kinds of things tracked? Perhaps that file(s) got corrupted somehow between logins.

Thanks,
Jeff