I'm having trouble with my audio on a Debian 13 Trixie installation on my Asus Strix GL503GE laptop. While everything was working fine at first, I recently noticed that the audio doesn't come through my headphones. The volume meter in the PulseAudio Volume Control GUI responds properly, but no sound is output to the headphones. The built-in speakers work perfectly when the headphones aren't connected, but once I plug them in, the speakers are marked as 'unavailable', and I can't play any sound regardless of what I select.
I have the firmware-realtek package version 20250410-2, along with PulseAudio 17.0 and PipeWire 1.4.2 installed. When I run `pulseaudio -v`, the logs indicate that PulseAudio recognizes the headphones, but the audio is not working. I suspect I might need to tweak the configuration in `analog-output-headphones.conf`, specifically to change the `switch = mute` directive, but I'm not sure what the best approach would be. Should I remove it, switch it to a different state, or is there something else I should do? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
Like SoundSavvy mentioned, switching to PipeWire can resolve these audio issues. It’s also a good idea to avoid modifying system-level configuration files in `/usr/share`. Instead, duplicate any necessary config files into your home directory. PulseAudio looks for config files in `~/.config/pulse/`, while for PipeWire, they can go in `~/.config/pipewire/`. This approach is cleaner and keeps your changes contained. Plus, the PipeWire documentation often provides clear guidance on this!
You might want to consider replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire. Many users have had better experiences with PipeWire, as it’s less buggy lately. You can install it using the following commands: `sudo apt install pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa wireplumber`, followed by `sudo apt remove pulseaudio && killall -9 pulseaudio` to remove PulseAudio. After that, enable the services with `systemctl --user enable pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber --now`. If it doesn't just work after that, you may need to go through some additional troubleshooting steps.
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