Unable to microphone

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 05 June 2011 19:32:20 JD wrote:
> On F14.
> Pulseaudio daemion is running.
> I can hear media playing.
> But I am unable to use microphone.
> i,e. no matter what app I use the mic
> with, (as in skype, or  gnome-sound-recorder
> or aurecord), my mic does not pick up my voice.
> I have a built-in and an external. Neither one
> is picking my voice.
> gnome-volume-control-applet shows me that
> I can select mic1 or mic2 as input.
> Neither one is working.
> I wonder if this is a pulseaudio issue?

I doubt it's a pulseaudio issue.

What is the output of "arecord -l"?

Are you sure that microphone is not muted or something? The only safe way to 
check that is to run alsamixer in the terminal, press F6 to choose the 
soundcard, select the actual hardware soundcard in the pop-up menu instead of 
the "default" (which represents the pulseaudio mixer), press F4 to see capture 
devices, and play around with the settings --- unmute everything, boost mic 
gain, etc. Then press ESC to exit alsamixer and try again with your favorite 
app.

Open the app, begin recording, open pavucontrol, go to "recording" and "input 
devices" tabs, and boost the capture volume if needed. Also check there that 
everything is unmuted.

If that doesn't do it, it's an ALSA problem with the driver for your card. 
Google is your friend.

I don't see any other place where a mic could fail. Also, if you are unsure of 
the proper config of your recording app (they often can be misconfigured by 
default, skype being the typical example), use arecord --- that should always 
work if your driver is ok. Read the "man arecord" for examples on how to use 
it.

>  I checked to see what I can do about pulseaudio, and I see that these
>  are all the pulseaudio and related packages and just a short chain
>  of dependencies (I dod not do an exhastive dependency search, but
>  you will see that it is impossible to remove some of the packages
>  without killing your system

Regardless of dependencies, I would say that it is a Bad Idea (tm) to remove 
pulseaudio. It is in the system for a reason, and it does its job well. PA is 
often used as a scapegoat when people run into sound problems, typically 
without it being the real culprit. Some time ago there was a witch-hunt 
against PA on this very list. It took a lot of persuading/teaching to help 
people realize that PA typically had nothing to do with their audio problems.

>  Here is a short list of dependents on these packages:
> 
>  pulseaudio-gdm-hooks is required by
>  gdm-2.32.1-2.fc14.i686

This is cute! :-) I really wonder why would a login manager need PA. Any 
ideas?

>  pulseaudio-libs is required by
>  pavucontrol-0.9.10-1.fc13.i686    <<<< Another killer dependency

Now, you *are* aware that "pavucontrol" stands for "PulseAudio Volume 
Control", right? How can you expect pavucontrol not to be a dependency on 
pulseaudio-libs?

In general, 90% of the audio problems are either down to wrong mixer settings 
(things being muted) or driver problems (ALSA being unable to drive the 
hardware). For the latter, you want to check on the Internet how good is the 
ALSA support for your hardware. For the former, the only two mixers I trust 
are alsamixer and pavucontrol. Note that in alsamixer you want to choose your 
sound card explicitly (or use the -c option) to reach the ALSA-level hardware 
mixer (which is below the pulseaudio mixer). Once you have configured the 
levels there, the only thing you ever need to use is pavucontrol, to change 
the levels of various sources on-the-fly, at the PA level.

Other mixers (from gnome, kde, etc.) *should* provide equivalent functionality 
(and typically this works well), but they are just GUI's wrapped around 
alsamixer and pavucontrol, so you gain nothing by using them (other than nice 
"visual desktop integration", ie. eye-candy). If you need to troubleshoot 
something, ignore them and use pavucontrol and alsamixer only.

HTH, :-)
Marko