Headphone jack not working?

I have a Dell Studio XPS 1647 and headphones do not work (though , internal speakers work like a charm) , I have dual boot Windows 7 and headphones work perfectly fine ...

I also tried -adding in options snd-hda-intel model=eapd probe_mask=1 position_fix=1.

I've experienced this with Oneric Ocelot and the latest Precise Pangolin (LTS).

14 Answers

I've tried all these responses. Here is the ONLY way that worked for me (and it was remarkably quick... after spending hours on all the other suggestions!). Go into Terminal, and simply key this in:

$ alsactl restore

And that's that! :)

I had the same problem. Following these instructions got my headphones working.

Open the terminal and enter the following commands:

cd /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/
sudo cp analog-output-headphones.conf analog-output-headphones.bak
sudo nano analog-output-headphones.conf

Look for the section called [Element Speaker] and change it so that it looks like this:

[Element Speaker]
switch = on
volume = ignore

Save the changes and exit nano.

Create a backup of the corrected analog-output-headphones.conf:

sudo cp analog-output-headphones.conf analog-output-headphones.fixed

Now you can restore the fix if a future installation or update overwrites it.

Reboot.

After rebooting, you may need to remove and reinsert the headphone plug to get it to work. After it's working, though, you will be able to remove and insert the plug, and behavior will be as expected.

Finally got Headphones to work ! Follow this ----- (Dell)

This is it :

Run the following command into the Terminal:

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Scroll down and add these lines to the end of the file:

# Keep snd-pcsp from being loaded as first soundcard
options snd-pcsp index=-2
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6-amic

Then, save , reboot and test sound using headphones and speakers.

i had same issue after installing 16.06 ubuntu gnome in my dell xps. then i solve this issue by .......

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

after install pavucontrol. open it by simply typing terminal pavucontrol.

then go to -> Output Devices tab -> change port

in my case seleted port was Headphones(plugged in) by default after plug headphone

change port Headphones(plugged in) to speakers (unavailable).

this is a temporary fix.after rebooting your pc you have to do this again.

The solution in a comment above by buzypy worked for me, without any of the other stuff:

sudo alsa force-reload

then reopen pavucontrol and change to the option Headphones (unplugged) and restart the program that was playing the sound.

It's problems like this that make people not want to use Ubuntu!

I had to do the following:

Exit out of google chrome (I'm trying to get music to play in a tab)
in a terminal, run killall chrome -- will probably say "none found" or whatever
kill pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k at a terminal. (it should restart silently in the background, but if not, try pulseaudio -d)
now run sudo alsa force-reload (Thanks @mjp!!)

I had the same issue. I did as below

Go to Settings
Click on Sound settings under hardware section
Click output tab (automatically selected by system)
On the bottom side: set the output volume to 100%

Thanks to

On my laptop, a Lenovo G465, the sound was working well: each time I plugged the headphones, it would be detected and sound was piped through the headphones and muting the speakers. Suddenly it stopped working. Something weird happened without any changes or installation or whatsoever. I read that someone had to use alsamixer to activate it: lo and behold: I tinkered with the volumes and mutings and suddenly it started working again as before!!! I have no explanation, honestly.

In my case, for a Dell E5450, it was resolved after runnning:

sudo modprobe snd-hda-codec-idt

To day I got it in easy way:

How to using headphone in Ubuntu:

Install update for Ubuntu.
Install GNOME alsa mixer.
Plug in both of back speakers and front headphone.
In ALSA: mute your front column, unmute in Headphone.
Go to Sound setting: unmute your sound that was made by ALSA.
Click the Test Sound button to go to Test Sound in Sound settings, check left and right ==> ONLY HEADPHONE has sound, Speaker will be silent.

I just recently upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04(KDE) and faced the same issue. None of the answers gave a permanent fix. The closest fix was by Pepe Lebuntu.

alsactl restore

However I had to do this everytime I replugged my headphones which became annoying. So I made an acpi event which triggers this command when headphones are plugged.

To do so create a file in the directory /etc/acpi/events

cd /etc/acpi/events
sudo nano headphone-fix

And add the following lines in the file

event=jack/headphone HEADPHONE plug
action=alsactl restore

Save and exit then restart the acpi service using

sudo service acpid restart

Replug your headphones and it should now be working everytime you plug it back

None of the previous answers posted fixed my issue on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS nor on 16.04 LTS. My computer uses a Clevo motherboard and luckily a developer known as Unrud created an easy fix called "init-headphone", which for the Ubuntu distro it is called "init-headphone-ubuntu". Basically, you just install the ".deb" package for Ubuntu and that's it, with no restart required (at least this was true for me).

To be clear, at this time, Unrud did not specifically create an 18.04 package, so I used Unrud's 16.04 (Xenial) package on 18.04 and it worked like a charm!

During boot, I was passing the parameter acpi=off (see Booting Ubuntu with "acpi=off" grub parameter).

After removing acpi=off, the headphones worked again.

Out of the box, sound was available via the headphone jack, into which I plugged either headphones or computer speakers.

Then I ran