ubuntu-audio-dev team mailing list archive

[David Henningsson <david.henningsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2011/11/29/turn-your-mic-jack-into-a-headphone-jack/

Most of today’s built-in sound cards are to some degree retaskable, 
which means that they can be used for more than one thing. That means 
you can turn your Mic jack into an extra Headphone jack, or why not make 
them both line outs, and connect them to your surround receiver?

I’ve known for a while that the kernel exposes an interface that makes 
it possible to retask your jacks, but almost no one seems to use it, or 
even know about it. So over the past few weeks I’ve been working (from 
time to time) with HDA-Jack-Retask, a small application that makes this 
interface easy to use.

Although primarily meant for power users, it focuses on simplicity: Just 
select your codec, then select which pins you want to override and what 
you want them to override to: Headphones, Line Out, Mic, Line In, and so 
on. There are buttons for trying it out right away, and for making your 
override the boot-time default. And of course, a button for removing all 
overrides in case things did not go as planned.

Consider it beta quality for now, and it’s one of those “won’t work for 
everyone” programs, but that’s mostly due to hardware and driver 
limitations.

It’s available for Ubuntu 11.10, and you can install it by adding 
ppa:diwic/hda and then installing the hda-jack-retask package. Start it 
by running “hda-jack-retask” in a terminal. Enjoy!

--
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic