Problem:

I recently switched back to a desktop as my main computer, and was surprised to learn I couldn't use my speakers if my headphones were plugged in.

I don't use a desktop environment (just Sway), so I rely on pavucontrol as a GUI to control my audio.

I could use my headphones just fine while my speakers were plugged in, but when I switched to my speakers in pavucontrol's interface, they would not output audio. My headphones would stop playing (as expected), and pavucontrol's little "dancing bar" would indicate that the speaker's port was processing an audio signal (as expected), but no sound was actually being produced.

Solution:

The culprit ended up being something called "Auto-Mute" in ALSA. To disable auto-mute mode, you can either:

1. Run the command amixer sset "Auto-Mute" unmute in a terminal
2. Run the command alsamixer in a terminal
   2.1 Press F6 and select your sound card
   2.2 Ensure you're viewing playback settings by pressing F3
   2.3 Move the item selection over until you've selected auto-mute mode
   2.4 Press the down arrow key to switch it to "Disabled"

That fixed my issue.

For me, auto-mute mode stayed disabled after a reboot. You might need to run the command alsactl store to make the configuration persistent though. The Arch Linux Wiki article on ALSA has a "tips and tricks" section that goes into more detail:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#Tips_and_tricks

I'm considering making the switch to pipewire, as my current setup involving a bridge between JACK and PulseAudio is growing frustrating. Even on a fresh boot, Spotify won't play until Pulse has been killed and restarted, and the same goes for games through Steam. All the while, Firefox audio works perfectly without doing so, and I can jump straight into recording with reaper without any issues from the get-go.

I've been reading through the Arch wiki to get a feel for what the process should be like, and it seems like it'll be relatively straightforward, but given that I do a lot of music recording on my computer, I don't want to experience a total breakage of my sound setup. I'm planning to make a full backup of my system before making any changes, so I can roll it back if need be, but if anybody has any experience with switching to pipewire on a production system, I'd be grateful to hear about any pitfalls or problems that you ran into which I should be aware of in advance!

By coding headphones I mean with active noise cancellation, to be focused on your work. However I'd like to have it more universal since i do play videogames in my freetime, so with a microphone would be best - Or should i have 2 sets for both activities?

Something below 100€ would be nice (naive yes, but I aint got much).

I looked at the Mixcder e7 on Amazon, which looked promising. Thoughts?