Headset microphone not detected by Pulse und Alsa

Question

I have an Acer Aspire V15 Nitro Laptop that only sports a combo jack for both microphone and headphones at the same time. It was always a bit tricky but worked until I reinstalled Arch Linux recently.

Since then the microphone part has not been detected anymore. In pavucontrol, using the previously working configuration "Analog Stereo Duplex", I can only select "Analog Input" (the internal mic, which does not work as well). There is no other option for the port.

alsamixer shows no input devices at all.

How can I get my external microphone back working?

Additional questions:

How can I see which devices are detected on a hardware level?

Solution 1

After some more searching I found a post that told me to create /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf with following contents:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-headset-multi

After reboot the headset microphone showed up again and works.

Solution 2

My laptop is ACER E5-573G-74Q5. My codec is Realtek ALC255.

I did Yurii S’s solution, but it didn’t work. Then Soundar gave me the idea of putting more than one codec in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, where I added the following line:

options snd-hda-intel model=alc255-acer,dell-headset-multi

Putting just one or the other didn't work, but putting both worked. Strange, but putting dell codec on my acer worked.

Comments

[Nobody moving away from SE]

Also confirmed to work for Dell Precision 7520, Ubuntu 18.04 by marp.

[xji]

So the laptop isn't actually Dell but you were still able to make it work by inserting this line, right? I'm having a similar issue on Thinkpad.

[Nobody moving away from SE]

@xij Yes, as I said in the question it is an Acer.

[jasperge]

As mentioned in this page docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:audio_and_snd-hda-intel you can do cat /proc/asound/card*/codec* | grep Codec. Then you can look up the codec in kernel.org/doc/html/latest/sound/hd-audio/models.html and see the options you can use.Unfortunately I can't get the headset mic to work on my MacBook Pro.

[Alireza Mirian]

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf doesn't exist for me on Fedora 29.

[Nobody moving away from SE]

@AlirezaMirian The post explicitly says you should create it.

[Alireza Mirian]

You're right, but I saw a similar solution on youtube in which the file was already existing. Not sure if I'm right or not but I think this Alsa thing is for ubuntu and and audio is handled by Pulse in Fedora by default.

[Nobody moving away from SE]

@AlirezaMirian AFAIK PulseAudio uses ALSA under the hood: ALSA is talking to the hardware while Pulse talks to the applications (and to ALSA). I am using Pulse on the system described above as well.

[Alireza Mirian]

You're right. I created the file and it worked like a charm. Thanks.

[Mathias Conradt]

Thank you, that solved it for me on Ubuntu 19.04

[Edip Ahmet]

@jasperge Thank you so much. It worked for Asus! My codec is Realtek options snd-hda-intel model=alc668-headset worked.

[Markus Dutschke]

same here! Acer TravelMate P256-M-53H6 Notebook from around 2016 with fedora 31. Options line was: options snd-hda-intel model=alc283-headset,dell-headset-multi. Needed to create /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf first. Did some trial and error of promising module candidates in kernel.org/doc/html/latest/kernel-hacking/index.html after calling cat /proc/asound/card*/codec* | grep Codec

[Abdelouahab]

confirmed with options snd-hda-intel model=dell-headset-multi even if it's an ASUS X560 on Pop OS 20.04