Internal Mic not working

English Multimedia
1

Hello everyone,

recently I have started to have problems with my internal mic, firstly noticed in Skype calls. To put it simply, no sound is captured by my mic. It is strange because I started having this problem after a reinstallation of openSUSE Leap 15.0, while in the previous installation (also openSUSE 15.0) I had the mic working. Lately I bought a HP Webcam HD2300, and after choosing the camera’s mic in Skype configurations, I still couldn’t get any sound.
I thought that maybe some libraries were missing and installed all of the following (as is recommended here: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Skype:slight_smile: ):


alsa-plugins-pulse
alsa-plugins-pulse-32bit
pavucontrol
libv4l 
libv4l-32bit
libv4l1-0
libv4l1-0-32bit
libv4l2-0
libv4l2-0-32bit 
libv4lconvert0
libv4lconvert0-32bit
libpulse0-32bit

After discovering that the problem remained, I tried to update all the system packages to the ones in the Packman repository. Again, no mic working. Most of you may think that I do not even know what I am doing, and maybe you’re right. I am pretty bad at troubleshooting multimedia.

I also checked PulseAudio Volume Control saw that, in the Input tab, while the internal mic didn’t react to any sound, I saw the camera’s mic bar reacting to sound. However, when recording sound with arecord or using Skype, I didn’t have any success.

In my last effort I ran the diagnostic tool

/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh

whose results can be found at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=d960c71571f01222d819588d4678f77f3f7cb0c5

At this stage I am hopeful that someone here more experienced could give me a light on this problem.
I really appreciate any help provided.

2

I had a quick look at the ALSA diagnostic output but found nothing obvious wrong. Fire up ‘pavucontrol’ and check the settings for the internal mic there. You might need to select the appropriate profile in the ‘Configuration’ tab as well.

FWIW, while conducting a quick search online I encountered a couple of threads where users found that the internal mic was being incorrectly treated as a stereo device by PulseAudio, and it was to unlock the channels first…
https://askubuntu.com/questions/6993/internal-microphone-not-working
https://superuser.com/questions/644314/internal-microphone-no-sound-level-in-pavucontrol-but-record-with-arecord-paca

3

I made a small advancement on this issue. I could put my HP Webcam HD2300 to work just my configuring the pavucontrol and setting the this Input device to fallback. There was no need to silence either channel. I tested with the arecord/aplay command and Skype and the tests were successful.

However the problem resides with my internal mic device, that is the card 1 in:


arecord -l

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: CX20756 Analog [CX20756 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: H2300 [HP Webcam HD 2300], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

I tried to record using this card:


arecord -f dat -d 5 -D hw:1,0 ~/test.wav
aplay -f dat ~/test.wav

but nothing.
At this point I am glad that I could get my HP Webcam mic to work, but am puzzled by internal laptop mic. It used to work in the past. Is it possible that this is some kind of kernel regression and my mic is no longer supported?
Anyway thank you for the feedback!

4

Good news !

How about trying a different arecord ?


arecord -f cd -D hw:1,0 -d 10 test-mic.wav

Also note you have boost set to zero on that mic.


**Card hw:1** 'PCH'/'HDA Intel PCH at 0xb3814000 irq 52'
....
**Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost',0**
  Capabilities: volume
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: 0 - 3
  Front Left: **0 [0%]** [0.00dB]
  Front Right: **0 [0%]** [0.00dB]

Did you try recording with higher boost levels?