Plug and Unplug Headphones

Troubleshooting SDK
#1

Hi everyone,

In my game, it is necessary, to unplug the headphones of the PC and plug in the speakers, while the game is running. I know, it sounds like a weird request, but its part of a weird scientific experiment :slight_smile: I guess, that unplugging the headphones does completely deactivate the audio renderer, since even after plugging them in again, there is no sound rendered at all.

Is there a way to listen to a “plug” event of the audio jack in jMonkey or in Java and to re-activate the audio renderer or what ever causes the mute?

Thanks for any help,

P.

#2

This is not an easy solution…

I’m not sure if there’s any specific event for detecting when audio devices are connected in Java, but I do know you can use the AudioSystem class in javax to find audio devices.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/sound/sampled/class-use/Mixer.Info.html

You might be able to use AudioSystem.isLineSupported() to check for a headphone port.

For example:

[java]

import javax.sound.sampled.AudioSystem;
import javax.sound.sampled.Mixer;
import javax.sound.sampled.Port.Info;

/**
*

  • @author Navid
    */
    public class TestAudioSystem {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

     for (Mixer.Info info : AudioSystem.getMixerInfo()) {
     System.out.println(info.getName() + ", " + info.getVersion() + ", " + info.getVendor() + ", " + info.getDescription());
 }
 
 String available = isHeadsetAvailable() ? "Headphones found!" : "Headphones not found!";
 System.out.println(available);

    }

    public static boolean isHeadsetAvailable() {
    return AudioSystem.isLineSupported(Info.HEADPHONE);
    }
    }
    [/java]

Unfortunately, AudioSystem.isLineSupported(Info.HEADPHONE) does not always work, because some computers do not have a specific headphones port/device on their computer, and simply have an audio-out jack. You will probably have to do some additional checks. You can always simply ask the user if they have headphones plugged in with a GUI prompt or something.

That’s all I know on this, sadly, someone else can probably tell you more.

EDIT: I just read more of the post, silly me, it seems like a completely different issue, unplugging the headphones should not cause the sound to turn off completely… that’s odd.

#3

On top of the fact that you don’t really have a way to detect this, not all audio interfaces actually do anything when you plug a headphone. Many laptop headphone jacks do but not even its all of them.

#4

Thanks @normen and @navid113 for your replies. I will try to figure out a different way. A work-around that seems to work is rather hardware solution, but probably even better for the otherwise excessivley used jack:

Using an extension I simply unplug the headphones from the extension and plug the speakers into the extension, and now it seems to work just fine …