Samsung earbud controls not working

[Kodietoad]

Hi all,

None of the controls on my earbuds (volume/pause/skip) are working on my Galaxy S8. What I mean by that is that nothing happens when I press any of the buttons, which I have tried to do in all of my audio-playing apps. The controls have worked perfectly for almost a year, up until a few days ago. Yes, they are the Samsung brand headphones that came with the phone. I have two friends who also have Galaxy S8s, and their earbuds also came with their phones, and their earbud controls do not work when connected to my phone either. This prompts me to believe that it is a problem with my phone rather than the earbuds.

I have not personally changed any settings or done anything even remotely fancy to the phone; I am one of those sinners who just use all the default settings on the phone the way it arrives from the store.

I have tried using a set of low quality bluetooth earbuds with pause and volume control buttons which seem to control the phone as intended, which leads me to think it's likely to be a physical problem with the jack in the phone, although I could be entirely wrong about that.

It is possible that the earbud volume/pause/skip control problems began when I updated my phone a few days ago, although I was not paying enough attention at the time to say with any confidence that that's when the problem started.

Any ideas for what a normal, non-techy person like me could try before giving up and deciding that my phone jack is just broken? I'd prefer to use regular wired headphones since I'm not a fan of the way bluetooth earbuds sit in your ear and constantly run out of battery.

Thank you in advance for any help!

 

[SpookDroid]

Unfortunately your assessment seems pretty plausible. If other headsets don't work on your phone but work on others' (and I assume you tried your headset with theirs and it worked), and BT headphones do work, then it's very likely a hardware issue with the port. So let's try to further debug this and see if, by any chance, it is a software bug:

1) Try a different set of wired headphones with controls (tricky since they have to be compatible with the pinout of the Samsung phones). Do those work?
2) Boot up your phone into Safe Mode and try them. Do they work? If they do, then a 3rd party app is causing the issue. Check any audio apps you might have installed or updated recently.
3) Make sure the headphone jack is FULLY inserted (just don't overdo it with the force) and the port is clean.
4) Have you tried different music players?

 

[noisywan]

Same problem here on Samsung Galaxy s7.
Earbud buttons are unresponsive after system update.
They don't work even in safe mode.
I've also tried opening the pull down volume sliders menu manually and pressing the buttons while control sliders are visible. It doesn't work.

Any suggestions?

What's the name of the system app that captures button commands? Could it be somehow disabled?

 

[october2]

Hi all,

None of the controls on my earbuds (volume/pause/skip) are working on my Galaxy S8. What I mean by that is that nothing happens when I press any of the buttons, which I have tried to do in all of my audio-playing apps. The controls have worked perfectly for almost a year, up until a few days ago. Yes, they are the Samsung brand headphones that came with the phone. I have two friends who also have Galaxy S8s, and their earbuds also came with their phones, and their earbud controls do not work when connected to my phone either. This prompts me to believe that it is a problem with my phone rather than the earbuds.

I have not personally changed any settings or done anything even remotely fancy to the phone; I am one of those sinners who just use all the default settings on the phone the way it arrives from the store.

I have tried using a set of low quality bluetooth earbuds with pause and volume control buttons which seem to control the phone as intended, which leads me to think it's likely to be a physical problem with the jack in the phone, although I could be entirely wrong about that.

It is possible that the earbud volume/pause/skip control problems began when I updated my phone a few days ago, although I was not paying enough attention at the time to say with any confidence that that's when the problem started.

Any ideas for what a normal, non-techy person like me could try before giving up and deciding that my phone jack is just broken? I'd prefer to use regular wired headphones since I'm not a fan of the way bluetooth earbuds sit in your ear and constantly run out of battery.

Thank you in advance for any help!

------ So your question is the first to come up in my google search for "samsung s8 akg earphone controls not working" and I clicked yours and 6 other one before finding a solution. Go to Settings > Phone > Storage and Clear Cache. Called someone right after and they could finally hear me and then went to SSoundcloud played a song and was able to use all earphone volume controls including play/stop and skip.

 

[Aruba18]

My Samsung earbud controls also stopped working including the microphone but not the pause/restart function when I completed a software update a few days ago on the Samsung Music app. I tried the same things others have tried with my S7 and the earbuds still don't work and neither do other brands of earbuds I've tried. Thanks Samsung! NOT.