On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 12:46 -0500, Pierre-Louis Bossart wrote: > My USB headsets have mute, volume up and volume down buttons exposed > with an HID interface. When I use them with Ubuntu/PulseAudio nothing > happens. > Wondering if this is not supported at all, if my config is broken or if > a manual setup is required as described in [1] - a basic workaround to > link keycodes and alsamixer. If PulseAudio had this information it could > do a much better job. > Thoughts? > Thanks, > -Pierre > > [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PlantronicsUSBHeadsetControls I don't know what the current state is for supporting USB headset controls. I don't have such hardware myself. I haven't heard any complaints for a long time, though, which would suggest that the support is pretty good, but if that's the case, I don't know how that is implemented. PulseAudio certainly has no special support for that (there is module-mmkbd-evdev, but that's not used in the default configuration). My understanding is that desktop environments run some daemon that monitors keyboard events, and when volume/mute events happen, they control the volume/mute of the default sink in PulseAudio. If USB headsets look like keyboards, and if they emit standard codes, I'd expect the daemon to pick up those events as well, and control the default sink. Maybe this works generally well enough that people don't complain a lot, but obviously there's the problem that if the headset isn't the default sink, the wrong sink gets controlled (and a mute event should probably mute the mic, not the headset speakers; I don't know if there's a separate mic-mute code defined). If the headset controls do nothing for you, maybe the emitted codes are non-standard? Connecting to the input device directly from PulseAudio has the problem that input devices tend not to be readable by regular users. --Â Tanu
