No sound through headphones

[atowler]

I'm having an issue with getting sound through my headphones. I've always had this issue with Maui, but I didn't bother fixing it because I didn't use headphones much prior to now. I have a Dell XPS 15 9550 if that matters. The issue is that I sometimes won't get sound from my headphones. I've tried several pair, so it's not the headphones themselves. Unplugging the headphones and plugging them back in doesn't help. Whatever's happening starts at boot and is only resolved by doing multiple reboots. I'd say rebooting fixes the problem 1 in 20 times, so it's rare that my sound works. The funny thing is that the speakers work fine, but I have to manually select the speaker as output since jack detection is also not working. Reboots don't seem to fix the jack detection, though. When the issue is occurring the proper audio device is selected and nothing is muted in alsamixer. I also tried moving my pulseaudio config files to no avail. Any suggestions for how to fix this annoying issue would be much appreciated!

[rocky7x]

Right click on volume indicator in system tray -> Audio Volume Settings -> Audio Volume tab -> Output devices there find something called Built in Audio Analog Stereo (or something that represents your internal sound card) and there you will see under it Port = Speakers -> change it to Headphones and the headphones will work. There is some automatic switch in Maui pulseaudio missing that should be doing this (there was already a thread somewhere in the forums about it).

[atowler]

Right click on volume indicator in system tray -> Audio Volume Settings -> Audio Volume tab -> Output devices there find something called Built in Audio Analog Stereo (or something that represents your internal sound card) and there you will see under it Port = Speakers -> change it to Headphones and the headphones will work. There is some automatic switch in Maui pulseaudio missing that should be doing this (there was already a thread somewhere in the forums about it).

Hi, rocky7x, thanks for the suggestion. I keep it on the headphone setting all the time. Switching to the speakers then back to headphones has no effect if the sound isn't working on boot. If the sound *IS* working on boot it works just fine. The problem is that I only get sound through the headphones every 1 out of 20 boots and nothing seems to change that. I'll have to look up that thread to get auto switching working, though, thanks for pointing that out.

[Kurtbw]

I'm the one who asked earlier about this issue.

Here's the thread:  https://forums.mauilinux.org/showthread.php?tid=23988

Fixed it for me.

[atowler]

I made that change and sometimes the sound doesn't work on boot. Unplugging and plugging back in the headphones multiple times eventually gets the sound to work.

[Kurtbw]

Dunno, but perhaps you're suffering some sort of caching issue with that code?  As in, for some reason, the machine chooses to clear out the part that doesn't work to replace it with the part that does work "when it feels like it"?

Hope that makes sense.  Good luck fixing your issue.

[atowler]

My sound isn't working again. Unplugging and plugging the headphones back in has no effect now for some reason. Interestingly pavucontrol is saying that my headphones aren't plugged in when they clearly are. Again, if I reboot like 25 times it will eventually work, but it's getting rather annoying. Is there anything that I can run to help with diagnosis?

[atowler]

It appears to be related to this issue https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sourc...ug/1575078

Indeed suspending and unsuspending fixes headphone audio until reboot when it breaks again.

[rocky7x]

There is maybe an easier solution to this, the one I often use: whenever my headphones are not detected, I kill pulseaudio by hitting Alt+F2 a writting the following command

Code:

pulseaudio -k

It restarts automatically in a second a when I check pavucontrol my headphones are always there after this. This way I don't have to fiddle with suspend unsuspend reboot etc.

[atowler]

I tried pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload but it didn't help.