Arch Linux

beardoof

Member

Registered: 2019-11-13

Posts: 14

Unable to properly retask audio jacks

Here's my problem: I have a desktop with front and back audio pannels. The back pannel is connected to some speakers which I use whenever I want to play games with other people or watch movies; the front pannel is connected to headphones, which I use to play games by myself, listen to music while working, etc. The problem is, my PC case is pretty old and unable to detect front pannel jack connections. On windows, I'm easily able to solve this problem because realtek drivers allow me to disable front pannel detection, so headphones are always assumed to be plugged on. On arch, however (I dual boot for gaming only), I can't seem to find an easy way to do something similar. Here's some  of the stuff I've tried, to no success:

1) Using the back pannel mic and a blue jack line in (which on windows is retasked to headphones without any problems) to stream audio to both devices at the same time. Mic works fine on Arch, but headphones don't. I've also tried it with other jacks, to no success. I've also followed the steps on hdajackretask, disabled pulseaudio and killed its auto-restart, then re-enabled it, to no avail. I've tried retasking some jacks from the back pannel, but as a result either the mic or the speakers (and phones) stop working.
2) Using the front pannel in a similar way to windows, with disabled front-jack detection. When I do so, headphones work perfectly, but mic doesn't. It doesn't show anywhere on sound devices. *EDIT* also, whenever I pick headphones as the main output device, both speakers and headphones work at the same time - which is fine since I can turn the speakers off, but isn't what is expected, so I imagine I'm doing something wrong.

I'm not sure what the "channel group" and "channel (in group)" options do in advanced overrides, could this have something to do with the problem? I didn't try messing with those.

I'm running KDE Plasma. I'm not sure which other info I should give about my system, so please ask whatever is needed.

Last edited by beardoof (2019-11-29 10:45:50)