alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf issue #356 was opened from halobarrlets: I have laptop Dell XPS 17 9720 SKU 0AFE which has microphones and webcam on top of the display connected to motherboard with cable. I need to have webcam and microphones disabled so I've disconnected the cable from motherboard. Because microphones are disconnected firmware fails to initialize them but speakers are initialized properly. With pulseaudio disabled and manually setting amixer I can play audio with speakers using aplay: ``` user@user:~$ amixer -c0 cset name='Speaker Switch' 1 numid=38,iface=MIXER,name='Speaker Switch' ; type=BOOLEAN,access=rw------,values=1 : values=on user@user:~$ amixer -c0 cset name='rt1316-1 DAC Switch' numid=75,iface=MIXER,name='rt1316-1 DAC Switch' ; type=BOOLEAN,access=rw------,values=2 : values=on,on user@user:~$ amixer -c0 cset name='rt1316-2 DAC Switch' 1 numid=76,iface=MIXER,name='rt1316-2 DAC Switch' ; type=BOOLEAN,access=rw------,values=2 : values=on,on user@user:~$ aplay -Dhw:0,2 test.wav ``` But with pulseaudio enabled it fails to load mixer because of missing microphones: `systemctl --user status pulseaudio` ``` systemd[1160]: Starting pulseaudio.service - Sound Service... pulseaudio[1176]: Failed to get the verb HiFi pulseaudio[1176]: No UCM verb is valid for hw:0 pulseaudio[1176]: Unable to load mixer: Invalid argument systemd[1160]: Started pulseaudio.service - Sound Service. ``` Thanks to @bardliao the problem was narrowed down to the problem with UCM from this issue https://github.com/thesofproject/linux/issues/4580#issuecomment-1723432549 so I'm reporting this issue here. Is it possible to fix this issue so UCM won't fail completely if one of the audio devices (microphones) is missing and will still initialize the available devices (speaker, jack output)? So that I can use speakers even without microphones? I'm using Debian unstable with latest kernel 6.5.0-rc6+ from https://github.com/thesofproject/linux and firmware-sof-signed 2.2.6-1. Here are the logs: [alsa-info.txt](https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/files/12688962/alsa-info.txt) [dmesg-cable-connected.txt](https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/files/12688964/dmesg-cable-connected.txt) [dmesg-cable-disconnected.txt](https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/files/12688965/dmesg-cable-disconnected.txt) `amixer contents -c0` [amixer-contents-cable-connected.txt](https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/files/12688993/amixer-contents-cable-connected.txt) [amixer-contents-cable-disconnected.txt](https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/files/12688994/amixer-contents-cable-disconnected.txt) Issue URL : https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/issues/356 Repository URL: https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf