Arch Linux

arphenius

Member

Registered: 2019-07-30

Posts: 2

MacBook Air 7,2 combo jack does not recognise external microphone

Hello everyone.

I did a fresh install of Arch Linux in my MacBook Air 7,2 last week alongside with some AUR firmware packages to get Wi-Fi and integrated camera working and the gnome pacman group as the desktop environment.

Sound at general works. If I open the sound settings, it recognizes integrated output and input devices, but when I connect my phone with microphone in the combo jack only the output devices list is updated (with headphones and integrated audio entries inside it), but the input devices remains only with the integrated input device.

In the macOS partition the combo jack works fine: when I plug the phone with microphone, I can select between integrated and phone's audio input/output, so clearly Arch Linux is not recognizing the microphone.

Here's some useful output:

$ lspci -nn | grep -i audio
00:03.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Broadwell-U Audio Controller [8086:160c] (rev 09)
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Wildcat Point-LP High Definition Audio Controller [8086:9ca0] (rev 03)

Thanks in advance

arphenius

Member

Registered: 2019-07-30

Posts: 2

Re: MacBook Air 7,2 combo jack does not recognise external microphone

After some research, I found that the problem is my Apple headphones. They implement the CTIA connector layout. After testing them in another Linux distributions, and even in Windows, and it seems that all non-Apple operating systems implement the OMTP connector layout, which prevents them to be correctly recognised by the current OS running.

Is there any way to map the correct connector layout in Arch Linux?