[conspire] no audio to headphone

[Akkana Peck]

paulz at ieee.org writes:
> Quoting Steve Litt (slitt at troubleshooters.com):
> > I call Pulseaudio the land of a thousand mutes.
> > I haven't used Ubuntu for a decade, but on most distros you can get rid> of Pulseaudio, install ALSA, and use alsamixer to control device> volumes.
> Meanwhile, I have been consulting with a ham friend who had similar issues.  She is using Debian.  Her advise was to remove pulse and use alsamixer.
> The only functionality is to output audio on the connector usually used for headphones.  A volume control on the computer side is a plus, but not necessary.

I used to consider "apt purge pulseaudio" (and then use alsa for everything) as the one fix most likely to fix any given sound problem. I lost count of the systems where that did the trick.

But that was then. I don't recommend it now, for one important reason: firefox sound output depends on pulseaudio, and I think all the other major browsers (like chromium) do too. So if you remove pulseaudio, you might be able to run some music players, but you won't ever be able to, say, watch a youtube video with sound. That's a showstopper for me.

You can recompile firefox to use alsa instead of pulse, but building your own firefox is a world of hurt much bigger than solving pulseaudio problems.

Regarding pavucontrol and that little button that's supposed to make something the default audio source or sink: never worked reliably for me. I can click that button til my finger is sore and still find sound going through some other device, or headphones not being recognized or whatever.

I ended up writing a script that uses pacmd and pactl to set the default device to some known thing, and I run it from my .zlogin. Not to say you should run my script; but you may find that making an alias for a specific set of pacmd/pactl commands is easier than fighting with pavucontrol and wondering why its default buttons aren't working.

I do use pavucontrol, for things like adjusting relative volumes of different pulseaudio inputs and outputs (pardon me, sources and sinks), but I don't rely on it for controlling which devices are used.

I wrote up what I learned about pulseaudio in the process of writing the script in a series of articles:
https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/pulseaudio-pavucontrol.html
http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/pulseaudio-command-line.html
https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/pulseaudio-volume-cmdline.html
And yeah, I know, it's a lot of reading. Sorry. Solving pulseaudio problems doesn't usually turn out to be simple.

I don't think any of my articles specifically touch on the issue of using the headphones from a particular audio device, because my laptop fried its headphone output when I was fiddling around trying to use it to feed sound to an external amp. So the laptop's built-in speakers still work fine, but anything plugged in to the headset jack just gets loud static. Lesson: don't plug anything that isn't headphones/earbuds into your headphone jack. Now I use a USB sound device to route sound to the amp and big speakers.

        ...Akkana