[pulseaudio-discuss] Inserting headphone "locks" audio

[Sean Greenslade]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2023 at 08:09:53AM -0700, John Oliver wrote:
> I have a ThinkPad X1 running Ubuntu 22.04 and a "ThinkPad Hybrid USB-C with
> USB-A Dock"  If I insert a headphone jack to the docking station, I can
> only hear sound coming from the headphones... I cannot switch to HDMI.  At
> my last job I had another ThinkPad running RHEL 8 and a docking station,
> and I was able to leave my headphones plugged in and switch to HDMI.  How
> can I fix?  The docking station is tucked away, and it's a bit of a chore
> to plug the headphones in and out.

Some audio interfaces have the HDMI and the analog ports exposed as
different profiles of the same card. If you run pavucontrol and go into
the Configuration tab, check what is listed in the Profile drop-down for
your audio card. The profile that corresponds to using only the analog
ports is usually called "Analog Stereo Duplex". The HDMI options (if
present) will have various names depending on the number of ports and
which channel configurations your card supports.

Changing the selection in that dropdown should live re-route any playing
audio to the selected port. Try selecting some of the HDMI options and
see if that gets the audio routed the way you want.

--Sean