Hello,
I recently started playing around with Linux and ended at opensuse. However, one problem remained throughout every Linux distribution I tried had the problem of the internal microphone of my computer not recording audio.
I already tried checking alsamixer and increased the volume of my microphone to its maximum, checked that it’s not muted, tried separating the microphone channels and muting one via pavucontrol and none of these methods seemed to work. Since I still have Windows installed on the machine I know that the microphone itself is completely functional.
Since I do not know what information might be helpful I tried to compile a bit here:
If you mean the settings in the last tab with configuration, I have it set to analog stereo duplex. Otherwise, I do not get what you mean by default output and input
Pavucontrol has separate tabs for Inputdevices, Output devices. Next to the lock symbol there’s a checkbox, “Set as fallback”. Make sure that’s not highlighted for the device you want to use.
I just tried that, to no avail. Any combination of left channel only, right channel only, set as fallback checked or unchecked did sadly not change anything. It’s just so frustrating, since I want to switch over to Linux completely, but without any microphone I can’t do that.
I am really glad for your help so far, thank you very much!
I did that and I can adjust a single Volume slider, however I noticed something odd. In pavucontrol I can only choose an analog stereo input, however the volume slider in Alsamixer is labeled digital, so I guess one of these must be wrong.
But since deano_ferrari pointed out that the microphone not working has been a well known problem with my series of laptops I guess that there really is no way around using a separate microphone. I did however already try a USB microphone on this machine and even that did not record any audio, is it usual, that such things still need manual configuration in Linux? As I mentioned, I really am a newbie at using linux.
For the most part (and assuming the device supported), there should be no action required other than to perhaps unmute and set levels as required. We would need the pertinent information to advise further though, otherwise we’re left to speculate from a distance.
Yeah, I got around to trying again and last time I apparently just missed unmuting the microphone. So at least now I can work with others while on linux. Thank you all very much for your help! Based on the age of the bug report I’d guess that it’s unlikely there’s actually a fix for the integrated mic.
Glad to read a USB microphone works, even if your internal mic does not.
For older hardware, its not often that a fix has not been found after many years. You could try writing a bug report on openSUSE kernel for your laptop internal mic, and see if the new attention you get will obtain the needed technical (driver development) attention to obtain a fix. We are fortunate with openSUSE that at least one (more ? ) of the openSUSE packagers is also an alsa sound driver developer. So if you write a bug report on the openSUSE kernel for this internal mic not working, you could end up with his attention, and if anyone in the world can solve this, he could be the person.