Speakers and Headphones play at the same time. Lenovo ThinkPad

Question

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. They worked fine until just a couple hours ago, and I see the other threads but they don't have solutions. None of 20 I must have looked at.

I looked at Alsamixer, but there is no auto-mute option. No matter how many times I hit the right arrow key. Muting the speakers mutes both the headphones and the speakers.

My headphones do not show up in the Sound Settings Output.

Any way to mute the speakers without muting the headphones would be appreciated. The speakers don't have to unmute when I unplug the headphones. Not physically breaking the speakers, but it might come to that.

I won't be able to follow instructions that aren't explicit, sorry. Thanks for anyone's time.

Answer 1

On my Lenovo G700 the combination microphone / headphone jack ("combo audio jack") does not automatically mute when plugging in headphones. The workaround for this is pretty low-level and you will need to be very comfortable with admin-ing your machine. Here is how to do it:

First download and build the "hda-verb" binary, which is a low-level debugging tool:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/tiwai/misc/hda-verb-0.4.tar.gz

Next take a look at your sound card's codec information under "/proc/asound". For my setup this was the command:

$ less /proc/asound/card0/codec#0

Look for the node number that has "OUT EAPD Balanced" or "Speaker at Int ATAPI" labels. On my setup, this was the node "0x0d".

Now look for your sound card's device path under "/dev/snd". Experiment with anything that has a name like "/dev/snd/hwC0D0", which was my setup.

Run this command to mute the internal speakers:

$ sudo hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x0d SET_CONN 1

Here you want to replace the "0x0d" with whatever node number you found above, and you will want to experiment with different device paths if necessary. Use "SET_CONN 0" at the end to unmute the internal speakers. If you have done this right, the headphone audio output will not change.

I created "mute_internal_speakers" and "unmute_internal_speakers" scripts to simplify this.