Sporadic audio issues when using 3.5mm expansion card

Community Support
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1

I have a Framework Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series), with OS: Linux Mint 22.3 - Cinnamon 64-bit. One of the expansion cards is a 3.5mm audio card.

The issue I have is sporadic. Sometimes, when I have a device plugged in to the 3.5mm audio card, sound stops working. I can unplug the earphones and the laptop’s speakers work fine, but no audio will work with anything plugged into the audio card.

Once my computer gets to this state, the Sound settings won’t show the plugged-in device. If I have something plugged in, and then I open Sound settings, no output devices will show up until I unplug from the audio card, and then the built-in speakers immediately appear.

The only fix I have found is to restart the computer. I assume there are relevant logs to look at, but I don’t know where to start.

2

Think you could start looking in the logs if alsa, pipewire and/or wireplumber are mad about something (this isn’t really normal, by the way)

3

There are a decent number of people in a FW16 Linux category thread with this issue:

I’m experiencing this and actively trying to track it down on my system. I am curious with some questions about your experience of it, too (primarily whether your system has done this since you got it, or if it was fine for a while and then started doing it at some point).