Ubuntu 12.04 – Dell Vostro 3750 – No Sound When Headphones are Plugged in

** This workaround did work for me for a while – I have now had to implement a new workaround to fix the issue now that it had resurfaced again. See this post for details. **

Having just installed Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) on my Dell Vostro 3750 I noticed that there was no sound when I plugged in my headphones.

The workaround was to edit /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output-headphones.conf.

Update: Since implementing this workaround I have found that updates have reverted the changes that I made to analog-output-headphones.conf. So I recommend making a backup of the original file, then making changes to analog-output-headphones.conf and then backing up the changed file.

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

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

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

Save the changes and then reboot.

After rebooting I found that I needed to remove my headphones and then insert the jack again to get them to work. Once they were working I could remove and insert the headphones jack and the behaviour was as expected.

With my configuration files backed up I can now easily revert to the original settings should I need to in the future or copy the fixed settings back if the settings are lost.

Source: bugs.launchpad.net

Credit to Ryan (bovorasr) for the workaround.