Realtek ALC897 Separate front and rear audio

[Louise-TGUK]

I am slowly but surely losing my mind over this.

I have been away from manjaro for 18 months and returning, previously I did not have any issue but now I cannot figure out how to get the front and rear audio ports to operate independently.

Please be gentle with me, I am really not up to scratch on the technical side of linux and getting a bit long in the tooth!

I can switch from headphones (front jack) to Speakers (rear jack) using the port selection, but I need to be able to output different audio to each simultaneously, I have gone through I don’t know how many web pages and nothing works, this thread here…

Separate Rear and Front Audio

Seen a lot of post where others are attempting the same thing, but haven’t seen any that actually solved it. For example… [Preformatted text](https://forum.manjaro.org/t/splitting-front-and-rear-outputs-on-realtek-hd-using-indep-hp/72426) I’ve also attempted that the Splitting Front/Rear that’s mention in the Arch wiki. The Headset & Speaker devices it creates show up, but don’t output any audio. The only way to get audio is to change the “Port” option (either Line Out or Headphone) in System S…

Seemed the most promising, but I don’t have an option for surround 4.0, following along that using surround 5.1 resulted in no audio at all.

I would be eternally grateful if someone can talk me through this.

[nikgnomic]

Configuring independent audio outputs can tricky even for experienced Linux users
(no simple tick-box in audio settings like Windows) and there is an inexpensive workaround - get a USB audio adapter for the 2nd output channel

The ArchiWiki example PulseAudio/Examples - Splitting front/rear is not a complete solution. PulseAudio or ALSA might need more reconfiguration for a fully working solution
Most users also want to reassign jack outputs to use the front headphone jack instead of the using 2 jacks on rear panel

@Louise-TGUK

I don’t have an option for surround 4.0

No surround 4.0 profile might be simple to resolve. But if it is not there is also another way to do this that does not need to use 4 surround channels and remap modules

I suggest:

1. plug headphones and speaker in to the 2 jack sockets on rear panel for surround 4.0
   If they are colour-coded use the green socket for front-left and front-right channels and black socket for rear-left and rear-right channels

2. post more information about audio cards detected in PulseAudio

   pactl list cards
   

3. and more information about ALSA playback devices

   aplay -l
   

[Louise-TGUK]

I think I still have a set of headphones with a usb sound adapter, I will dig through the electronic waste boxes and try to find those before diving further down the rabbit hole as that sounds like an much simpler option.

Not entirely sure why I did not think about that myself, I guess I just got focussed on the problem and blinded myself!

Thanks for the redirection, I will update with results when/ if I find them.