Arch Linux

Thinkpad E495

Member

Registered: 2021-05-29

Posts: 10

Integrated speakers/microphone don't work with headphones plugged in

When I plug some headphones in the 3.5mm jack port of my laptop, the integrated speakers and microphone stop working.
Instead I would like to be able to use the integrated microphone while listening through headphones, since my headphones don't embed a microphone.

I uploaded the whole output of pactl list on pastebin:

• With the headphones NOT plugged in (internal speakers and microphone work): https://pastebin.com/QbhDmY6s

• With the headphones plugged in (internal speakers and microphone do NOT work): https://pastebin.com/sDP6rw9F

The difference is in the Ports of "Sink #0", "Source #1" and "Card #1": those about the internal speakers and microphone become "not available" when headphones are plugged in.

This issue started recently. Up to one or to weeks ago I was able to use the integrated microphone while listening through the headphones. It happens both with 3-pin jacks and 4-pin ones.

How can I further debug the issue and figure out what's wrong?

Software and hardware used: the latest Arch Linux with Pulseaudio 14.2, KDE Plasma 5.21.5, Linux 5.12.6-arch1-1 on an x86-64 Lenovo Thinkpad E495 (AMD Ryzen 5 3500U).

In the past few days I tried to ask for help on reddit, unix.stackexchange and PulseAudio's matrix channel, but couldn't find a solution yet.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,990

Re: Integrated speakers/microphone don't work with headphones plugged in

That's usually up to a lower layer than pulse. Check out the HDA codec reconfiguration as detailed in: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ … figuration I'd presume the auto-mic hint to be relevant here. Alternatively you can look into using something like hdajackretask to retask the jack into a mic only.

Last edited by V1del (2021-05-29 09:58:13)

Thinkpad E495

Member

Registered: 2021-05-29

Posts: 10

Re: Integrated speakers/microphone don't work with headphones plugged in

Thanks V1del, I manage to find a solution following your suggestion: setting auto_mic = 0 solved the issue.

For some reason the HD-Audio Reconfiguration doesn't work on my system though, so I had to create a patch file and reload the driver.

Is there any way to make my configuration a bit less hacky? In the past both the integrated speakers/mic and the ones connected to the jack port could be used at the same time and I could switch between them using any PulseAudio interface: that was perfect.
It looks to me like this could be a regression in the source code of snd-hda-intel and/or the codec? Should I open an issue on https://bugzilla.kernel.org/ ?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,990

Re: Integrated speakers/microphone don't work with headphones plugged in

Afaik the behaviour like you were used to was technically a bug. Normally you'd want both to switch but these hints are there to adjust certain things. If you want them to be different to each other indep_hp is another hint you can set that should logically decouple speaker and headphone  from each other.

Thinkpad E495

Member

Registered: 2021-05-29

Posts: 10

Re: Integrated speakers/microphone don't work with headphones plugged in

Yes, being able to see the integrated peripherals independently from the jack port is exactly what I would want.
I set indep_hp to true, but that one didn't work. Integrated speakers/microphone and headphones are still ports of the same card/source/sink.

Unless there are technical reasons for it, I'm surprised that stopping me from using some of my hardware for no apparent reason is considered a feature. Is it so different from force-disabling my integrated WiFi card if I plug in an USB one? I guess that this discussion should happen somewhere else, though.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,990

Re: Integrated speakers/microphone don't work with headphones plugged in

Did you restart pulse after setting indep_hp it will likely need to reread cards. As far as I understood the indep_hp sink you should now have an additional card to play back to in e.g. aplay -l's listing. Once you're there that the two are distinct cards setting up pulse to recognize them as such should not be that big of a deal if push comes to shove defining a custom profile that splits them again isn't that big of a deal.

What's your

aplay -l
pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks

with the indep hint set?

Thinkpad E495

Member

Registered: 2021-05-29

Posts: 10

Re: Integrated speakers/microphone don't work with headphones plugged in

Yes, I did restart pulseaudio. I reloaded the snd-hda-intel module with my codec patch (sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel patch=,fix-my-jack), now /sys/class/sound/hwC1D0/hints shows "indep_hp = true" so I'm sure it took it, then I killed PulseAudio (pulseaudio -k) and let KDE restart it.

I uploaded the output of your commands to pastebin: https://pastebin.com/eMN4x44t