Headphones with built-in mic

Solution 1:

It sounds like your headphones have a single jack that includes both the headphone and mic connections. This is called a "4-position" or "4-pin" connector. As you have discovered, unless your computer has a plug designed to use one of those connectors, only one or the other will work.

The 4-pin jacks are more common on smaller devices that benefit more from combining the two audio jacks into one. To find out if your computer has one of these 4-pin jacks, you could:

• Look at the marking on the jack to see if it has both headphone and mic icons, or an icon of a headset that shows both.
• Look up your computer/motherboard module, or info from sudo lshw -c sound, to see if the specs or discussions mention anything about this hardware having a 4-pin jack

If your computer doesn't have a 4-pin jack, a workaround would be an adapter that will plug into your headset, and then provide separate headphone and mic plugs for your computer. This will be something like a 3.5mm combo jack splitter, headset to PC.