Headsets work fine and probably bluetooth speakers (haven’t tried those), but the laptop’s in-built speakers randomly stopped working. I don’t know when they stopped doing because I was busy trying to resolve my issues with installing the unity editor (worst experience in any software I’ve ever had). I’ve tried everything I can think of and I’m outa ideas, digging into hardware issues is not my forte, I normally leave everything but volume and resolution well alone. I’ve tried looking around similar topics but haven’t spotted anything that would help me yet. For now here’s some results of the possible commands you’ll want me to run:
Had video playing in background to indicate I had checked volume 1st.
Is there anything else I should try?
Edit: the BT speakers I had WERE working as a substitute but now this morning they don’t, I did notice the USB sound card was incorrectly configured as HD True Audio instead of 7.1 Surround Sound so I corrected that, however that was before using the BT speakers.
In the second pic, Volume Control window, Output Devices; the USB 2.0 High-Speed True HD device is muted, click on the left of the 3 icons on the right to unmute.
If that doesn’t help try the Configuration tab and see if you can change to your desired Output Device.
Server-3: PipeWire v: 1.0.0 status: active with: 1: wireplumber
status: active 2: pipewire-alsa type: plugin tools: pw-cat,pw-cli,wpctl
Server-4: PulseAudio v: 16.1 status: active tools: pacat,pactl,pavucontrol
As far as I know you should have either Pulseaudio or Pipewire active but not both. I’m on Xfce and I have removed pipewire after it introduced issues, my sound servers look like this:
Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.0 status: off with: 1: pipewire-media-session
status: off 2: pw-jack type: plugin tools: pw-cat,pw-cli
Server-2: PulseAudio v: 16.1 status: active with: pulseaudio-alsa
type: plugin tools: pacat,pactl,pavucontrol
Check this forum for ‘remove pipewire’ or wait 'til someone more knowledgeable than me can give you better info/directions.
Edit: Nope, reboot didn’t help, my laptop does have a [Fn] though, when I hit the mute combo twice the speakers do give A sound but beyond that my problem doesn’t get fixed so I don’t think it’s the mute issue.
Edit 2: Given the lack of option between in-built speakers and BT speakers I do believe something fundamental has gone wrong at device enumeration/enablement area of things
Edit 3: I briefly had the BT speakers working earlier so I thought to try unplugging them to see if the laptop would switch to it’s built-in speakers. Regretted that choice as the whole system crashed, I guess it’s not designed to expect those red and white…jacks? to be removed during a game’s usage of it.
Edit 4: Ran pulseaudio-ctl and got this:
pulseaudio-ctl v1.70
/usr/bin/pulseaudio-ctl {up,down,mute,mute-input,set,atmost,full-status} [n]
Where up and down adjust volume in ±5 % increments
Where up and down [n] adjust volume in ±n % increments
Where mute toggles the mute status on/off
Where mute-input toggles the input status on/off
Where set set the volume to [n] %
Where atmost only takes effect if current volume is higher than [n]
Where full-status prints volume level, sink and source mute state to stdout
Optionally, redefine an upper threshold in /home/zxuiji/.config/pulseaudio-ctl/config
Volume level : 92 %
Is sink muted : no
Is source muted : yes
Detected sink : 0
Detected source : 1
That “Is source muted” seems iffy to me, dunno what to make of it though as I would normally not touch this stuff for the sake of my own sanity. Gonna take a bath since I don’t expect a fast response on this edit.
btw if manjaro devs or even better the pipewire and pulseaudio devs see this message, then I have a suggestion, since pipewire is clearly becoming the default, wouldn’t it make more sense to recode pulseaudio to rely entirely on pipewire’s variables by just pointing it’s own variables at pipewire’s? Should in theory resolve the mix & match issue and allow both to co-exist. Sure the variables pavucontrol etc change will need to be changed to those of pipewire but that should be a relatively easy fix in comparison to trying to maintain compatibility at the binary level between the 2 standards.
Installed the manjaro-pipewire package instead, it being XFCE I had assumed it was still on X11 and thus was using pulseaudio. Was actually on XWayland and as soon as the package finished installing the video that was stuck in the background started playing the BT speakers started playing the audio from said video. Gonna wait on the video to finish (to give the view YT didn’t register because I had downloaded it during the early stages where I thought it was a network issue) before disconnecting the now jack connected BT speakers. Used an adaptor to connect the white & red slots to a female jack slot which has the actual jack inside it.
Edit: Didn’t like that either, but didn’t cause a crash this time, 'bout to reboot laptop since I mistakenly assumed that because the sound card was PNP that I could just remove it will and pop it in at will again after (for moving the wire) but nope, system doesn’t see it now so gotta reboot.
In mean time any thoughts on my custom makefile for simplifying manually overriding the volume control linked commands?
Edit 2: No idea how but after a trip to college (need a specific qualification for a job hunting scheme) the speaker issue had resolved itself (only BT speakers had been working before I left).
I guess something in the motherboard’s connections had gotten corrupted somehow (is that even a thing?). Takeaway for future readers, try leaving the laptop/desktop/whatever off for long enough for all residual session data to clear.
