I am currently running Stretch, with alsa and pulseaudio.
This box has three users. My wife and daughter both get sound through
Firefox, as well as 'play filename.mp3'. Neither method works for my
login. When using 'aplay filename.mp3' all users get static.
Some background:
A few months back, my /home partition was accidentally wiped. (It was
mounted where I did not think it was. No backups. My bad. New
external drive for backups, now.) Data recovery managed to get back
my wife's and daughter's directories, but not mine. My guess is that
there were configuration files that I no longer have under my login
that are necessary for sound.
An interesting note: I just tried playing a file (play filename.mp3)
while displaying the PulseAudio Volume Meter. It says that sound is
playing. Then I noticed that it is showing volume for the 'Loopback
Analog Stero'. I did the same thing under my wife's and daughter's
login and the sound was going to the 'Built-in Audio Analog Stereo'
How do I tell Alsa/PulseAudio to use the Built-in sound device, and
not the loopback device?
Marc