mircophone and ubuntu 9.10: SOLVED

[MightyKhan]

ACTUAL SOLUTION METHOD DESCRIBED IN 12TH POST IN THIS THREAD.


Ive searched the internet for hours onwards and tried just about anything I came across, but it still wouldn't fix my problem: my microphone doesn't work.
I know its not hardware, because it works fine on windows. (this also means I plugged it in right ;-) )

I was wondering if theres anyone here who has similar problems, or knows how to get rid of them.

Some information:
~: lspci | grep Audio
04:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT1708/A [Azalia HDAC] (VIA High Definition Audio Controller)

if theres anyone who knows more about ubuntu than I do, please help me.. i really wish to be able to use skype without having to resort to windows...

cheers,
Khan

[vulp]

Quick guess would be that problem has something to do with the libsdl pulse audio or alsa drivers.
Hopefully someone has better ideas.

[MightyKhan]

what's weird is that I can actually record sound.. that is, a lot of noise and any sound the computer produces (like music playing, or NWN sounds)

there was a recent kernel upgrade: 2.6.31-20 is the current version
I searched the synaptec package manager for "libsdl alsa" and installed linux-backports-modules-alsa-2.6.31-20-server and generic. i removed all other (older versions). the manager asked for a restart, so that's what I'm doing next. let's hope it works...

edit: it didn't =(

[Balduvard]

What are your Volume Control settings? Did you try adding Mic, MIX, or Mic Record to it? Since it's capable of recording sounds (a la stereo mix/wave ouput), my guess is you need to change the recording input, as you would do in Windows.

[MightyKhan]

Heres a screenshot of the regular sound preferences window and the alsamixer gui:
dl.dropbox.com/u/4084819/soundsettings.png
(only the link, i found it too large to use [ img])

In bottom right window, I can choose between
analog input
analog line-in
analog mircophone

which switches the Rec box tick in the top window between
aux
line
mic

respectively

[Balduvard]

You could try what's described in this page or this thread.

[MightyKhan]

i couldnt find those myself (i guess im not that good at googling..)
will try when i get home, thanx

[arek]

What programs have you tried the mic in? I had trouble with Ubuntu 9.10 out of the box with skype, iirc. Removing PulseAudio fixed that (there are instructions on how to do so out there on the net, just do a search).

That said, Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1 works perfectly with skype 2.1, right out of the box.

If you're looking for ventrilo, look here for a native client...wine and pulse don't play well together...never have.

I hope this helps. :-)

--Arek
Fellow Ubuntu User

[MightyKhan]

well, the easiest to get program to test the mic was the basic Sound Recorder program.

just removed pulseaudio through synaptec, restarting in a minute.
if that doesnt work, im gonna follow Baldy's links.

just restarted and all sound works, except for the mic (tested it with Skype this time).
and Sound Recorder has started complaining:
"Your audio capture settings are invalid. Please correct them with the "Sound Preferences" under the System-Preferences menu."
However nothing happens when I click on System->Preferences->Sound
I also noticed the sound volume icon that normally appears in the system tray is now gone...
Gnome ALSAmixer works fine still.

[arek]

bleh, I should have been clear when I said to search - I meant it. Just doing "aptitude purge pulseaudio" isn't enough, there are several steps to removing pulse and still having working sound. Look here for full details on doing so.

If sound (including your mic) doesn't start working after that, you might want to check and make sure that 'rec' is checked on the 'capture' device, in gnome alsamixer, and then fiddle with the 'mic boost' option and see if that helps.

If nothing above helps, then I'd look over the forum link bort provided (and the posts it links to) very carefully. There isn't any information specific to your card that I saw right off, but there's some info on via cards in general in one of the links, and they might provide some information on how, possibly, to configure your card by hand, and possibly get the mic working (they're fairly old, tho...and the howto link bort posted is dated around 2006, judging by the version it mentions (6.06 == the 2006 June release)).

--Arek

[MightyKhan]

damn windows.. i booted it up to see whether the mic really did work there and it somehow corrupted my harddrives. Had to reinstall 9.10 because it wouldnt mount sda6 somehow..
good thing i put my home directory on a different partition...

[MightyKhan]

w00t! i love you guys!

i removed pulse the correct way (doh! at my first attempt..)
then did what Baldys (not Bort's ;-) ) first link described and Ding!

[MightyKhan]

just thought I'd post a little update, in case anyone is using the above suggestions to fix their mircophone.

with just alsa installed, I got rather crappy overal sound output. especially music played with banshee and some flash movies produced a lot of crackling. some games too.

so I decided to start up synaptec, type in pulseaudio, and mark the first hit for installation: PulseAudio (description: PulseAudio soundserver).
this had me install 4 more pulseaudio thingies and had me remove esound (dunno what it is or why it had to go).

anyhow, my microphone works still and I no longer get crappy sound. it also put back the volume control icon in the system tray.