[Solved]Rear Speakers cut off when Front headset is plugged

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Griffin
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[Solved]Rear Speakers cut off when Front headset is plugged

Post#1 by Griffin » 07 Aug 2013, 19:11

Greetings!

Porteus Newby. First post.

To get right down to business: rear speakers sound cut off when I plug in the front headset.

KMix sound mixer toolbar applet: sliding all the sliders toward full volume did not resolve the issue. Test sounds came out the rear when the headset is disconnected, but came out only from the front headset when the headset is connected.

gnome-mplayer: changing audio from “stereo” to “surround” does not seem to change anything.

Review of the Porteus documentation and searching the Porteus fora has yielded no solution.

Porteus Settings Centre > “Sound Settings indicates: One or fewer sound cards were detected, so this utility is not needed . If your sound is not working properly, please post a report on our forum at http://porteus.org/forum.

So here I am.

Immediate situation: my pre-Porteus hard drive just died and I am trying out relatively small 64-bit Linux distributions which can run fully in RAM. Porteus looks like the best possible “keeper” so far. Except for this sound problem.

Computer usage:

I use this computer for Skype, so I need (1) sound via the always-plugged-in rear speakers to hear the Skype phone ring from the next room, and (2) I need to be able to quickly slip on the always plugged-in front headset to quickly answer the Skype phone. This has worked fine on this very computer when using other distributions, although it has sometimes required configuring the panel GUI sound applet to get everything working right (most recently it worked fine using Ubuntu 11.10 on this computer - before the Ubuntu 11.10 hard drive died. RIP ).

This is not now working with this new installation of Porteus. Rear speakers work fine, but turn off when the front headset is plugged in. Unplug the front headset and the rear speakers work, again. Unfortunately, I need all to work at the same time - plugging in and then unplugging the front headphones every time I answer a phone call is too cumbersome and too time-consuming - the caller may hang up before I am plugged in, and I may then have to call the caller back.

Setup:

Porteus-v2.0-x86_64.ISO (KDE desktop) burned to a CD (md5sums matched - CD was burned and verified via k3b) installed entirely into RAM to try Porteus out on this computer. Porteus runs wicked fast in RAM. Nice!

Intel Core 2 dual core
4 GB RAM - plenty of room left.

No hard drive (it just died) or USB flash drive: running with no net at present! Therefore no ability to reboot into a modified Porteus that I can see - at this time.


A few command line details:

guest@porteus:~$ aplay -l | grep card
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC662 rev1 Analog [ALC662 rev1 Analog]
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC662 rev1 Digital [ALC662 rev1 Digital]

(note: KMix > Audio Setup indicates that the << ALC662 rev1 Analog >> device is the default. Trying out the << digital >> version showed no difference in behavior.

----------------------------------------------

Using the << speaker-test -Dplug:surround40 -c4 >> command to “Produce 4 speaker sound from two stereo jacks” in the following two situations yields two different results:

(1) when the front headset is unplugged, sound is heard from the rear speakers, but they are misidentified as “front speakers “:

actual left rear static test sound <- mislabeled “0-Front Left”
actual right rear speaker static test sound <- mislabled “1 - Front Right”

(2) when the front headset is then plugged in, no sound is heard from the rear speakers. The front headphones are now correctly labeled as “front”

actual left front earphone static test sound <- correctly labeled “0-Front Left”
actual rightfront earphone static test sound <- “1 - correctly labeled “1-Front Right”

Here is one actual run:

guest@porteus:~$ speaker-test -Dplug:surround40 -c4

speaker-test 1.0.26

Playback device is plug:surround40
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 4 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 32 to 8192
Period size range from 16 to 4096
Using max buffer size 8192
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 2048
was set buffer_size = 8192
0 - Front Left
1 - Front Right
3 - Rear Right
2 - Rear Left

--------------------------------------

Any suggestions to help resolve this problem would be welcome.


Best regards,

Griffin
Last edited by Griffin on 13 Aug 2013, 05:22, edited 1 time in total.

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francois
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Re: Rear Speakers cut off when Front headset is plugged in

Post#2 by francois » 08 Aug 2013, 00:56

|Welcome Griffin.

Did you ever used the alsamixer command?

Code: Select all

root@porteus:~# alsamixer
This might help for now while someone more knowledgeable comes to the rescue. :)
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Re: Rear Speakers cut off when Front headset is plugged in

Post#3 by brokenman » 08 Aug 2013, 01:45

You may want to take a look at hda-verb which seems to be written to cater to these needs.

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/tiwai/misc/
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Griffin
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Distribution: Porteus-v2.0-x86_64
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Re: Rear Speakers cut off when Front headset is plugged in

Post#4 by Griffin » 08 Aug 2013, 21:00

Francois,


Thank you for your kind welcome.

Alsamixer looks hauntingly familiar - it may have been how I resolved such matters within prior distros, though the precise memory has faded. I will give it a go.

----

Brokenman,


Thank you for the heads-up on hda-verb. If alsamixer fails to resolve the issue, I will give hda-verb a go.

-----

And now -

Time for sleep. I will get back to this in a more rested state and let Y'all know how it goes.


Good day -

Griffin

Griffin
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Joined: 07 Aug 2013, 18:57
Distribution: Porteus-v2.0-x86_64
Location: Midwest

Re: Rear Speakers cut off when Front headset is plugged in

Post#5 by Griffin » 13 Aug 2013, 05:18

Solved.

Alsamixer > Auto_Mut > Toggle to "Disabled"


Thank you both.

Griffin


Now - how do I mark this thread "Solved?"

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Re: [Solved]Rear Speakers cut off when Front headset is plug

Post#6 by francois » 13 Aug 2013, 15:33

You just found it! I hope this solution is more than acceptable for you. If not there might be a script at bootup to fix the issue more permanently. I think dev team members could provide some some advice on that. 8)
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