Okay, so I'm running Debian Testing and a few days ago, the audio from my desktops front 3.5mm audiojack just died for apparently no reason.
Fortunately, I have a USB sound adapter that just worked when I plugged it in, so I didn't have to resort to a clean install to get Orca and espeakup speaking again, but while this works, it isn't ideal as:
-The adaptor is a rather bulky dongle, the kind that would block adjacent USB ports if the ports on the front of my desktop weren't spaced out to accomodate such things, the kind where one is fearful an accident is going to lead to the dongle's connecter snapping off in the port.
-The adaptor is louder than my on-board audio(using alsamixer's master volume, 30% from the adaptor is about 40% from the on board, 20% from the adaptor is maybe 25% from the on-board. This wouldn't be a problem on its own, but whereas the on-board, when it's working, lets me go down to 1% and only mutes at 0%, the adaptor mutes if I go below 18% and the 1% from the adaptor is louder than the 20% I often keep alsamixer at when usingthe on-board audio. Not uncomfortably loud, but still louder than I would prefer.
Plugging and unpluging my earphones from the adapter's earphone jack is harder than doing so from the on-board jack... Plus, I frequently make the mistake of plugging into the on-board instead of the adapter.
I suspect I could fix the issue by reinstalling Debian, but with how much I've altered my setup from a default Debian Testing with Speech and LXDE installation, and not knowing which, if any, of those alterations caused the problem(though I'm not aware of any changes I made right before the on-board cut out that would affect sound), I would rather fix it in my existing system than do a clean install.
If it matters, best I can tell, selecting LXDE as desktop in Debian Testing's netinst defaults to pulseaudio as sound system and the only change I've made to pulse beyond keeping packages uptodate via aptitude was running scripts provided by Fenrir that make Orca and espeakup play nice, but that was weeks, if not months ago. And if It matters, I'm running AMD64 kernel version 6.11.9, though I was running 6.11.7 when the problem started.
Any help anyone can provide would be much appreciated.