So suddenly I see “No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.” instead of the usual volume control tool in Feisty. I googled the problem and most of the solutions hinged around the system not detecting the soundcard, or the user forgetting that they didn’t have one =) But my sound had been working fine for a few months, so it had to be something else. In this case, careless use of the ‘usermod’ command; I used the command ‘usermod -G groupname’ to add my user to a group I had just created. Unfortunately it removed me from every other group, including the ‘audio’ group.
A quick gedit of /etc/group and I was back in business. The moral of the story: if your sound suddenly stops working, check that your user is still a member of the audio group. Oh, and use ‘usermod’ more carefully than I did.
