Mate And USB Headphones

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Logitech H540 headphones were working fine.

Suddenly stopped.

Sound Preferences says they are disabled but gives no hints on how to enable them, or how they became disabled.

Tried rebooting, unplugging them, etc.

Anyone know what is going on?

This motherboard doesn’t have onboard sound, this USB is my only option. And GNOME simply isn’t usable for me, I used GNOME for years but GNOME 3
literally gets in my way all the freaking time trying to force me to do things the new way that just aren’t conductive to my thinking style – so MATE is what I use.

I have no clue how these headphones became “disabled” or how to change them back to enabled.

4 thoughts on - Mate And USB Headphones

  • Maybe a stupid question, but did you try your headphones on another computer?
    Is the device listed in the ouput of command “lsusb”?

  • I got that to work.

    I had to remove the blacklist for the useless Intel HD audio on the video card that CentOS 7 likes to pick by default even though the video card doesn’t have an audio out except HDMI – but with that driver allowed, the audio system reset and the USB headphones are no longer listed as disabled.

    There has to be a better way and there needs to be a way to enable a device that is listed as disabled for unknown reasons, serious UI issue.

    I don’t understand why the sound control panel doesn’t allow one to enable a device it has listed as disabled.

    The disabled kernel module was for Intel HD which is NOT what the USB
    headphones uses, and it works fine with that kernel module disabled, it just wouldn’t let me enable the headphones after whatever disabled them disabled them.

  • On my C7 Mate system I have what may be the same issue:
    if the “sound preferences” app (aka Mate Volume Control) is already running at the time the USB headphones are plugged in, the USB phones appear as disabled.

    OTOH, if the phones are plugged in, then the Mate Volume Control is started, they are not listed as disabled.

    When that first began happening (a year or two ago, I think) I
    posted on the Mate forums and someone said he thought he saw the bug and would do a build to fix it. unfortunately his build did not fix it, and it has remained.

    AFAIK, I have no sound hardware blacklisted (where do you blacklist it?)
    I have an Nvidia card with HDMI output, and it shows up in the sound app, but since I don’t do HDMI video on this machine I always just ignore that device.

  • I leave the headphones plugged in all the time, they were working fine and just recently stopped after doing some work in Audacity, I am wondering if Audacity disabled them for some reason but if it did, not while I was using it.

    I’m at a loss as to what triggered them to be listed as disabled.

    Blacklist is in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

    On mine it consists of

    blacklist snd_hda_intel blacklist snd_hda_codec_hdmi

    I think only the first is necessary to prevent the useless sound chip from being chosen but I have both lines there.