Hello all, I recently did an 'apt update; apt upgrade' on my desktop which is running testing (aka buster). Doing so led to my losing sound through any application that relies on pulseaudio, e.g. firefox. I could still use console based tools (e.g. mocp) to listen to music but pulseaudio could not find my default built-in sound card, only the nvidia card which provides sound through HDMI. Unfortunately, not having any audio device connected via HDMI, I could not hear anything. I only have speakers connected through the headphone jack. (old skool)
Purging timidity from my system fixed the problem. I did this based on the advice from this web page: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=154002 although I am not entirely sure why this worked. Halfway through the purging operation, sound came back without even having to reboot or restart any services. Just a heads up in case somebody else loses sound all of a sudden. -- Eric S Fraga via Emacs 27.0.50 & org 9.1.14 on Debian buster/sid