No headphones sound on Kubuntu 18.4
 

Hello,

I have a problem configuring the sound output of headphones in Kubuntu 18.4. When I have no headphones plugged in everything works fine. When I insert the plug I have no sound on the headphones. Basically, there AlsaMixer from the command line. AlsaMixer shows my master being in the correct volume, Headphones all the way up to 100% and Speakers all the way down to 0% and muted. I read around that this is not considered fault but the only workaround I found so far is to highlight Speakers unmute it and move it to 100%. But this workaround works only temporarily. The next time I connect the plug again I am back at square 1 (or 0). I also tried to disable auto-mute mode (which doesn't produce an acceptable solution, as the sound comes from both the speakers and headphones) but I get the same result. Every time I reconnect the plug the previous settings have been lost. The laptop is a MSI 8RF.
Thank you!

use PulseAudio?
open pavucontrol and check output tab. It might be muted through that.

Kubuntu I assume you use KDE.

KDE has a rather complex way to deal with different sound inputs and sound outputs. If you go to "system settings" in KDE, the control panel thing, and an option "multimedia" (not sure it's the same name in Kubuntu), there are lots of controls for audio input and output. So have a look in there instead. As far as I know, whatever mixer you have in KDE is based on those settings anyways.

Ooh, and btw, KDE seperates all sound streams, so if you have a hardware mute "fn+f8" for example on headset, you might still have sound on speakers when using those. So double check that as well.

I would try to describe in more details, but there are so many settings in there that you will just have to familiarise yourself a bit with them first and try to adjust what seems logical.

At this point, the next thing I would do is boot to a Live CD of something not *buntu and test with it to rule out a hardware issue.

If it is hardware, no amount of messing with software will fix it.

Does the problem apply to all applications, or only to KDE ones, or only to non-KDE ones? That too would be a useful diagnostic.

Well, I'd stick to trying to figure it out first. The likelihood that it is a hardware issue is very low. In that case the priority would be to try to headset on something else to see if it works.

Ofcourse, there could theoretically be a hardware issue with the analogue sound output port, but the likelihood of that is very small. Smaller even than a software issue (kernel) with the same port.

This is not a hardware problem, I can have sound when I unmute the speakers. this is a common problem but web search doesn't return a solution. I tried Kmix, PulseAudio to no avail.

alsamixer?

I finally solved it by creating an event on acpi. When headphones are plugged-in execute "amixer set Speaker 100%+ unmute". Not sure if it the best solution but it works for now.

I went a couple times through this problem ( when I did "distro upgrade" in Kubuntu ), and I finally solved when I found this post
in this thread
#post5938347

So, setting PAVU control ( running "pavucontrol" from the shell or Krunner ) like the image attached, made it work the headphones instantly.