RutSum

Linux Hates My Sound Input System

I have been trying so hard over the years to get my microphone to work in a sustainable manner with my Linux installation, but unsuccessfully. I tried it with Dapper Drake, Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon, openSUSE, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. All I got was disappointment. Posted my issue on forums, discussed it with Linux experts, spammed IRC channels, but I got no answer.

The Problem

ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is the default audio library in almost all of the popular Linux distros available today. alsaconf is a tool for ALSA that automatically detects your sound card and configures it for you. When I ran alsaconf and saw that it recognized my sound card, I wasn’t surprised at all. This is not unusual, almost all of my hardware works perfectly fine with most Linux distros, out of the box.

I found out about the problem when I used an application where my mic is used – Skype. At first, Skype works great. I can talk, have conversations, smoothly. But suddenly, usually in the middle of a conversation, my sound input stops responding. Meanwhile, I can hear the other person’s voice clearly, but the person can’t hear mine. Soon, Skype serves me with a message that my sound input device isn’t working, or worse, it doesn’t exist.

From this experience, it seems that the problem is related to Skype, but it isn’t. I tried using my mic on a freshly installed Mepis system, not with Skype, but in Audacity, with similar results. The sound input simply stops working after a random period of time.

The KMix interface only adds to the confusion. For example, have a look at this screenshot -

The green dots above the channels is for mute. When the color is bright fluorescent green, it means the channel isn’t muted, it’s alive. The dull green means that the channel is muted. On the other hand, the pink dots below mean ‘selected’ when bright and ‘not selected’ when dull. I had a hard time figuring this out. The surprising thing was that my mic was working (for a short time, remember) even when it was muted all along. When I unmuted it, I could hear my voice (thorugh the mic) back from my speakers.

Another source of confusion is two devices listed – Mic and Front Mic. Never really understood the difference between them. Discovered by hit and trial that my mic worked when I selected ‘Mic’ as the input device and not ‘Front Mic’. This was a problem in Windows too – any application that used my mic (Skype, Google Talk) automatically changed my input device to ‘Front Mic’, which I had to override later on, manually.

The Solution

I found an entry under the Sabayon Wiki and I thought that the problems listed here are more or less all of my problems combined. So I thought of giving it a shot. I followed all steps religiously, did everything written over there. The result was temporary victory; I got my mic to work, but that soon died out, and the problem returned. I am still waiting for a solution.

P.S. – At the time of writing this post, the mic is working again, hopefully temporarily.

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