might be helpful to someone so here we are cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9547307
so since I digged pretty hard to find what is a ucm profile and how to seperate headphones from speakers in pipewire and alsa so yeah heres a guide first of all these are my sources:
https://github.com/luisbocanegra/linux-guide-split-audio-ports https://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3556 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3552
you need a custom ucm profile use this command since its helpful lspci -nn -vvv
SUBSYSTEM!="sound", GOTO="pipewire_end" ACTION!="change", GOTO="pipewire_end" KERNEL!="card*", GOTO="pipewire_end" ATTRS{subsystem_vendor}=="0x103c", ATTRS{subsystem_device}=="0x8742", ENV{ACP_PROFILE_SET}="custom.conf" LABEL="pipewire_end"and than create a file in /usr/share/alsa-card-profile/mixer/profile-sets/custom.conf and yeah I guess
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Backends/ALSA/Profiles/
and this especially
https://github.com/luisbocanegra/linux-guide-split-audio-ports
they helped a lot
[General] auto-profiles = yes [Mapping headphones] device-strings= hw:0,2 channel-map = left,right paths-output = behe-headphones paths-input = analog-input-headphone-mic analog-input-headset-mic priority = 20 [Mapping speaker] device-strings= hw:0,0 channel-map = left,right paths-output = behe-speaker paths-input = analog-input-front-mic analog-input-rear-mic analog-input-internal-mic analog-input-dock-mic analog-input analog-input-mic analog-input-linein analog-input-aux analog-input-video analog-input-tvtuner analog-input-fm analog-input-mic-line analog-input-headphone-mic analog-input-headset-mic priority = 18 [Profile help] input-mappings = speaker headphones output-mappings = speaker headphones description = both_both_is_good skip-probe = yes priority = 100 .include 9999-custom.confand yes that was my custom.conf and yes just reboot now and you are set btw no need to touch hdajackretask and that idor 0,2 and 0,0 I just switched profile to proaudio and than ran pactl list sinks short and took the ids from there I am basically following the guides and mimicking /usr/share/alsa-card-profile/mixer/profile-sets/default.conf to be completely honest yes thats all
Okay, so you're splitting these up into control profiles, but why wouldn't you just use pavucontrol if your goal is simplified and isolated control over each device with apps requesting sink access?
I want to for exemple even when my headphones are plugged have the ablility to play audio through my speakers using qpwgraph and stuff like that its just a cool little thing I wanted to do also you can't do that in pavucontrol natively when you plug in headphones its as if your speaker doesn't exist you can't for example play the same audio on your headphones and speakers at the same time or play different audio its relatively niche kinda thing but its handy for the few times I needed it to be honest