Score:5

Earphone mic doesn't work on Ubuntu 21.10

cn flag

My laptop (Lenovo IdeaPad 330) has a fresh install of Ubuntu 21.10. During normal and regular use just after installation, the earphone mic was being recognised and it was functioning well. Then some time later, maybe a few weeks, the earphone mic wasn't being recognised. Pavucontrol says it is unplugged. I don't know if this is because of some update, because whenever I plug in my earphones, it brings up this prompt, which I didn't see previously.

(Please read the question till the end before flagging it as duplicate. Thank you!)

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I click on Headset, thinking it will allow the mic to be used, but it simply doesn't. PulseAudio Volume Control still says "Headset Microphone (unplugged)". Clicking on Headphones doesn't help either.

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Checking for microphone options under settings doesn't even list the external microphone

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These are the details about my sound card and chip

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Additional hardware info:

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I'm not sure about what to do and the other questions on AskUbuntu do not match mine (they are about internal microphone or about driver issues but I do not think this is a driver problem because the external mic was working previously with no issues - but I may be wrong) or do not have any answers.

Please help.

Score:2
cn flag

This issue can be resolved by following these steps:

  1. Find out your machine's codecs with cat /proc/asound/card*/codec* | grep Codec
  2. In my case I saw Codec: Realtek ALC236 Codec: Intel Kabylake HDMI.
  3. Go to www.kernel.org and lookup your codec. In my case it was Realtek ALC23x
  4. I chose dell-headset-multi as the other codec options did not work for me.
  5. Add the line options snd-hda-intel model=dell-headset-multi in the alsa-base.conf file by opening the file with the command sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and edit it.
  6. Save and close the file. Reboot your system for the changes to take effect.

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