On my Asus F201E with Ubuntu 13.10, I have used headphones without problems until a few days ago, I opened Clementine and Audacity at the same time, and now my headphone port does not work anymore. I am not sure if those two apps are related to the issue, but this is the only thing I can think of.

Reading other similar questions around AskUbuntu (about 8 of them), I could not find a solution that would work for me.

The problem is not related to the headphones (same issue with three sets), and the internal speakers of the laptop work fine. The headphones are still recognised as the speakers are muted when the headphones are plugged.
The issue is not a hardware issue as I could boot into a usb startup disk with 13.10 and use headphones without any problems.

When a sound is supposed to be sent to the headphones (music, or sound when changing the sound level for example), I only get a little "breathing" sound or a crackle.
I played with the sound settings to no avail (changing the output manually), as well as alsamixer.
I also tried reinstalling (and purging) the following packages:

• alsa-base


• pulseaudio


• indicator-sound

But nothing changed.
I also tried editing the following files:

• /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf


• /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output-headphones.conf

as suggested in that question, but still no results.

I am sure I could reinstall the whole system but I have so many apps, ppa, configuration files and documents everywhere that I would rather find a smaller fix.

I was wondering if you had any idea of other packages I could try to uninstall ; purge ; reinstall?
Or any other idea?

Cheers!

Update: I edited this as I now figured out that it is Audacity's problem. Every time I try to use it, my headphone port stops working straight away, and even when Audacity is closed, I can not use anything else with my headphones. It takes a few days before the problem fixes itself somehow.