Separate speakers and headphones output

alsaaudio

I have a PC with builtin soundcard, and it has one output for the speakers (behind the computer) and one for the headphones (on the front side).

When I play something, the sound goes to both outputs.

I'd like to have the two devices detected separately, so I can choose which of them should play what.

In KMix I can disable the speakers (shown as Front) and the headphones separately.

However, in the applications' audio settings, all the devices available either play on both or none of them.

My OS is PCLinuxos, using ALSA as sound server.

Here's my alsa-info output.

Best Answer

Your hardware has only a single digital-to-analog converter, whose output can be routed to multiple jacks. You cannot create a second DAC out of thin air with some software setting.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu: No sound from speakers, headphones jack detected even when no headphones are connected

Guess: The laptop BIOS is lying to ALSA, and giving it a wrong headphone jack codec node which always detects "connected".

Look at your analog codec with

cat /proc/asound/card*/codec\#*

and use hdajackretask from package alsa-tools-gui to correct this if it is true.

Also see here for background information.

I don't know why it happened "suddenly", and can't explain the "sudden" change, but that's the first place I'd look. It's probably unrelated to the distro you are using, and it might have been always broken, and your hardware "suddenly" decided to switch from "undetected" to "detected" for the unused node with open pins. Or something complete different.

Edit

The Pin Complex info provided by the BIOS looks ok (or at least not as jumbled as the "lying" ones I've seen), so maybe it's something else. Try the following: Run evtest as root, select (in turn) each device that corresponds to soundcard plug events (usually they have HDA Intel or something similar in the name), and plug in/out your headphone and see if you actually receive events. According to the codec, you should have at least two of those, one for the headphone (Node 0x21) and one for the mic (Node 0x19).

Possibly the headphone/mic jack detection hardware is just broken. Or maybe something completely different.

Debian – No headphones output on Debian Buster

Two users on a Debian Facebook group provided the answer for this one. First I had to install libsamplerate0 and uncomment the lines

allow-module-loading
resample-method = src-sinc-best-quality
avoid-resampling

on the file /etc/pulse/daemon.conf; actually the first line has other sampling method by default, that's why it is necessary to install libsamplerate0. Then I had to create the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf with the single line

options snd-hda-intel model=headset-mic

and then restart alsa and pulseaudio services. Now audio works both on the internal speakers and on headphones/speakers plugged in the audio jack.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu: No sound from speakers, headphones jack detected even when no headphones are connected

Debian – No headphones output on Debian Buster

Related Question