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On my Notebook (with Realtek ALC269VB) the sound over speakers works well until I plugin the headphones, Speakes get muted as expected but no sound on headphones. I noticed that as soon as I plugin the headphones, Alsamixer, Ubuntu Sound Control and pavucontrol switched to 'Headphones' which have no effect (does not really exist). When I switch back to 'Speakers' everything is fine; I can control the sound of headphones. This is a kind of work-around (starting pavucontrol to switch from Headphones to Speakers) but not relly satisfying.

My complete sound configuration and a screenshot of Alsamixer.

You may notice that Alsamixer says 'Intel Cougarpoint HDMI' instead of 'Intel HDA Realtec ALC269VB' what it did two days ago. Anyway, I couldn't find any differences between it.

My question:

In order to easy the work-around: is there a command line option to switch to 'Speakers'?

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  • Related: askubuntu.com/questions/71863/…
    – Takkat
    May 22, 2012 at 7:16
  • In the first place I'm looking for a solution that avoids the problem at all: How to avoid that an input (sound) is switched from sink 'Speakers' to a not existing sink 'Headphones' when I plugin my headphones? Thanks to Takkat for the work-around link. May 22, 2012 at 15:50

1 Answer 1

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Pulseaudio always tries to switch to a newly available audio port when it becomes available. To stop this we can edit our default.pa. This file is located in /etc/pulse (defining settings for all users) or in ~/.pulse (to override these settings for a single user). Just comment out this line to stop pulseaudio from switching ports as follows:

# load-module module-switch-on-port-available

To take effect we need to restart pulseaudio server with pulseaudio -k (or restarting our session).

Whenever you edit the /etc/pulse/default.pa please make a backup first to be able to restore previous settings in case something goes wrong.

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  • Yes, now it works perfectly. By the way, restarting the session is not enough but 'pulseaudio -k' makes it happen. May 23, 2012 at 21:50
  • It works. Thank you. Now I have the same volume state for the speakers and headphones. Is it possible to save and restore the volume states when pluging/unpluging the headphones ?
    – Thomio
    Jan 26, 2014 at 15:42

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