[pulseaudio-discuss] internal speaker silent in Asus eee netbook (patch)

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2017-10-14 at 18:12 +0200, Guenter Milde wrote:
> Dear Tanu,
> 
> On Thu Oct 12 Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> > On Mon, 2017-10-09 at 18:45 +0200, Guenter Milde wrote:
> > > On Sat Aug 5 Tanu Kaskinen tanuk at iki.fi wrote:
> > > What is the difference between "switch = off" and "switch = mute"?
> 
> ...
> > "switch = off" means that PulseAudio sets the switch to off. "switch =
> > mute" means that the switch state follows the sink mute state. If you
> > set the Headphone element switch to "mute" in the speaker path, then
> > headphones will be unmuted when the sink is unmuted while having the
> > speaker port active.
> 
> My test shows that with "switch=mute", I can toggle the mute-state of
> speaker and headphones independently. Unmuting the speaker does
> not unmute the headphones and vice versa. So while there is a chance to make
> both, speaker and headphones active, this requires very specific user action.

How did you test? Since the Headphone element mutes both headphones and
speakers, you can't mute headphones independently from speakers. If you
mean that you can mute the sink in pulseaudio while using headphones,
and the sink gets automatically unmuted when you switch to the speaker
port, that's because PulseAudio stores the sink mute status separately
for the two ports and the alsa mixer gets updated during a port switch.

> > analog-output-speaker used to have "switch = mute" for Headphone, but
> > that was changed in this commit:
> > https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=22aac4e9fdb3786178f7815a0cb2150f588b1582
> 
> The reason given there is a bit different but valid.
> I agree that generally, it is preferable to switch off the headphone control
> if headphones are not plugged in.
> However, if the alternative is not any sound from the speakers, muting
> the headphones (instead of switching off) is still an acceptable
> workaround.

I don't know what you mean by "muting the headphones (instead of
switching off)". The alsa mixer switch only has two states. "Muted" and
"switched off" mean the same thing.

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk