Re: no sound in headphones

[Liviu Andronic <landronimirc@gmail.com>]

On 9/20/09, Emanoil Kotsev <deloptes@yahoo.com> wrote:
> When starting multimedia application it picks up the default audio device
>  which is not your headset output.
>  
Shouldn't the switch occur automatically when external speakers or headphones are plugged in? This is the behaviour that I always encountered on Windows and on Linux. 


>  you can play with aplay -D ... man aplay and findout yourself which device
>  id the headphone one.
>  
I get the following output: 
liviu@debian-liv:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: STAC92xx Digital [STAC92xx Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: ATI HDMI [ATI HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0


liviu@debian-liv:~$ aplay -L
default:CARD=SB
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog
    Default Audio Device
front:CARD=SB,DEV=0
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=SB,DEV=0
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=SB,DEV=0
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=SB,DEV=0
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=SB,DEV=0
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=SB,DEV=0
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog
    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=SB,DEV=0
    HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Digital
    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
hdmi:CARD=HDMI
    HDA ATI HDMI, ATI HDMI
    HDMI Audio Output


I am now testing each PCM device on a .wav file, and the first three (including "front") do not behave differently in the presence of plugged-in headphones. 

For the fourth and fifth, I get this error: 
sh>aplay -D surround41 "autumn_(from_the_four_seasons).wav"  (5809)
Playing WAVE 'autumn_(from_the_four_seasons).wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Stereo
aplay: set_params:957: Broken configuration for this PCM: no configurations available
sh>aplay -D surround41 "autumn_(from_the_four_seasons).wav" (5809) returned '1'


The next two, surround51 and surround71, behave in the same way as first three: when headphones are plugged in, the speaker is not muted and the audio stream is not switched to the headphones. 
Probably as expected, iec958 and null produce no perceivable sound output. 

I also did this debugging on alsa 1.0.21 (unstable), with no change in behaviour. 

A wild guess: could JACK of PulseAudio help in such cases? Would it be worth understanding how they work and configure them? 

I also found this post [1] that suggests to rebuild alsa with 
./configure --with-oss=yes --with-sequencer=yes --with-cards=hda-intel

Is there way to find out whether the one shipped on Debian is built in this way?  
Liviu

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg20526.html