Hello ALSA folks,
TL;DR: I wanted to play sounds on the built-in speakers and headphones
at the same time, fiddled with some settings ("alsa mixer paths"), they
didn't do what I wanted, reverted the settings, and now no sound comes
out of the speakers, nor the headphones: it looks like the analog codec
is no longer recognized by ALSA.
To expand a little, this is an old Thinkpad (Thinkpad 25, a version of
T470), that worked perfectly until I decided I wanted simultaneous
output on the speakers and the headphones. I googled around and found
this tutorial:
https://github.com/luisbocanegra/linux-guide-split-audio-ports
which advises to "disable Headphone jack detection for speakers", so I
edited the file:
/usr/share/alsa-card-profile/mixer/paths/analog-output-speaker.conf
basically applying the following diff:
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
device.icon_name = audio-speakers
[Jack Headphone]
-state.plugged = no
+state.plugged = unknown
state.unplugged = unknown
[Jack Dock Headphone]
@@ -97,9 +97,6 @@
; This profile path is intended to control the speaker, let's mute headphones
; else there will be a spike when plugging in headphones
-[Element Headphone]
-switch = off
-volume = off
[Element Headphone,1]
switch = off
After restarting pipewire and wireplumber, I noticed that things didn't
work the way I expected. It's all a blur right now, but I believe either
the speakers or the headphones were still muted, but the opposite way
you'd think: sound was coming out of the speakers when the headphones
where plugged in.
In any case, I decided this is not what I wanted, so I wanted to revert
to the original state. I undid my changes, restarted pipewire and
things seemed to be back to normal. A couple of days later, I noticed
that pavucontrol still thought the headphones were plugged in (they were
not), and I thought this might be some leftover from my mucking around,
so I decided to reboot the computer, to go back to a clean slate.
After rebooting, no sound was coming from the speakers anymore, and
pavucontrol was only showing a "Dummy Output". In the Configuration
tab, the "Built-in audio" card was only showing HDMI profiles: the
analog stereo output profile was notably missing. Some digging around
revealed that ALSA itself was not seeing the analog "device"(?),
"codec"(?) anymore, only the HDMI ones.
I've uploaded the output of alsa-info.sh:
http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=63ac5dc2278fd29319b71cf425b581011f58dcb6
I've also tried booting from a live CD, to make sure I didn't forget
cleaning up some cached data, but pavucontrol on the live system showed
the exact same situation. It appears that my experiments put the card
in some persistent unhappy state, that prevents ALSA from properly using
it.
I then tried booting into a FreeBSD live CD (NomadBSD, to be precise),
and lo and behold, the card worked there. Rebooting into Linux, the
card kept working, so I re-ran alsa-info.sh, and got this output:
http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=4abea62a33c046bdc7ad4d0860f3910885a80317
It looks like I have a Realtek ALC298 analog codec, that was not
recognized in the broken state.
A couple of days later, I noticed pavucontrol was once again thinking my
headphones were plugged it (they were not), and no sound was coming from
the speakers, nor the headphones (when they were plugged in). Looking
in the kernel logs, I saw this:
snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: azx_get_response timeout, switching to polling mode: last cmd=0x0173b080
snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: No response from codec, disabling MSI: last cmd=0x0173b080
snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: azx_get_response timeout, switching to single_cmd mode: last cmd=0x0173b080
Rebooting the system brought me back in the previous broken state, with
the Realtek codec not getting recognized, with nothing about it in the
kernel log.
So, what do you think? Is there any way to restore my sound card to
health, or am I forever stuck with Bluetooth speakers? Is there any way
to reset the audio controllers?
Any advice will be deeply appreciated.
Thanks,
-=[david]=-
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