I must be blind...or the setting doesn't exist. I've never really needed it before but now I do: is there a way of getting phonon/alsa/xine/kmix or any combination thereof to mute all connected speakers whenever a pair of headphones are attached to the right connector? That is, whenever I use the headphones all other speakers should be muted - no matter if the speakers are internal on a laptop or connected externally?

This is usually handled by ALSA drivers... If a channel is available in alsamixer, this may be possible though.

Yes, I realize that alsa (or oss if that is being used instead) is ultimately responsible for producing the sound and routing it to the correct destination.

However, I thought there would be a setting somewhere in either kmix or phonon (forget that I mentioned xine...) to configure alsa that way. At least kmix is, as far as I've understood and please correct me if I'm wrong, essentially a graphical frontend for doing that?

Still, it doesn't seem to be an option in the cli alsamixer tool to do it either so I may have barked up the wrong tree.

It seems strange though that it is possible to mute/unmute the headphones separately (but not change the volume for the headphones only) from the rest of the speakers but not the other way around. If I mute the headphones, those go mute but the speakers still produce sounds (which is the way it should be). If I mute the speakers (or the master channel really, which is all that is possible on my setup) the headphones are muted as well.

The only workaround I've found is to physically unplug the external speakers, which is rather inconvenient (and wouldn't work on a laptop at any rate). There must be a better solution somewhere.

KMix is a frontend to the mixers ( such as Master, PCM, etc. ) which ALSA provides, yes.

On my old laptop at least, plugging headphones in caused the internal speaker to be automatically muted. If you cannot see an ALSA mixer that provides this function however, it is likely not possible unfortunately.

My new system plays sound out the speakers when I plug headphones in as well. I think this is a bug in the ALSA driver ( which on my old system at least automatically did the muting )

bcooksley wrote:My new system plays sound out the speakers when I plug headphones in as well. I think this is a bug in the ALSA driver ( which on my old system at least automatically did the muting )

Ah, okay. Thanks for that. I thought I remembered my old system automatically muting but since it is now in silicon heaven I couldn't verify whether I remembered right or wrong. And even if I did remember right, if I had made some more or less stupid configuration error on the new system to make that feature inoperative.

I guess you should try an alternative for this.

I, too, am having this problem on my (relatively) new desktop and my old netbook though they manifest differently. I'm using KDE 4.5.4 in PCLinuxOS 2010.10.

Desktop (Gateway w/Intel i3)
- Control Center hardware shows: "5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio"
- Control Center Sound Configuration shows: "Intel HDA driver (‎snd_hda_intel [ALSA])"
- System Settings | Hardware | Multimedia | Phonon shows: "HDA Intel (ALC888 Analog)"
- Symptoms: Master and Front sliders control the volume for speakers plugged into the back and the headphones plugged into the front. The Headphones "slider" is just a mute button which works on the headphones. Can't silence the speakers using KMix without also silencing the headphones.
- Desired outcome: When I plug the earphones into the front panel the speakers should be muted automatically and when I unplug the earphones the speakers should be re-enabled. This is what happens on the Windows 7 installation that was native to this machine.

Netbook (ASUS eeePC 1000)
- Control Center hardware shows: "N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller" and "PC Speaker"
- Control Center Sound Configuration shows: "Intel HDA driver (‎snd_hda_intel [ALSA])"
- System Settings | Hardware | Multimedia | Phonon shows: "HDA Intel (ALC269 Analog)"
- Symptoms: Master sliders controls the volume for speakers and the headphones. The Speaker slider controls the volume for the built-in speakers but doesn't affect the headphones. The Headphones slider controls the volume for the headphones but doesn't affect the built-in speakers. This is good except that plugging in the headphones no longer mutes the built-in speakers.
- Desired outcome: When I plug the earphones into the front panel the speakers should be muted automatically and when I unplug the earphones the speakers should be re-enabled. This is what happens on the Windows XP installation that was native to this machine and on the PCLinuxOS installation that preceded this upgrade (2009 w/KDE 3.?).

I can see that some people would want to have speakers and headphones working simultaneously (sound engineers, DJs, etc.) but I would wager that most people want the speakers off when the headphones go on. It used to work this way. How do I get it back to that state?

Thanks,
Scott