Today my microphone settings suddenly changed and couldn’t be found at all. It was ultimately able to find my external but was still acting strange. After messing around with it, including reinstalling the OS, I have found the only way it works is if it is set on “pro mode” in PAVU control [added the Pipeline-Pulse" file]
Before it worked normally out of the box.
I suppose I could just live with the annoyance but am also intolerably curious about what has happened:
If I set it to Pro Audio it fills my sound with “Alder Lake-N PCH High Definition Audio Controller Pro” and then a 3, 4, 5, and 31 version of this which appear to all be the same. There is no way to remove them.
For input, it will only show the microphone at all in this Pro Audio mode, and shows "Alder Lake-N PCH High Definition Audio Controller Pro with a 6 and 7 version as well as the unnumbered one. Only 7 reads any sounds.
It is really quite annoying having this well of irrelevant audio devices on my sounds, especially with no apparent way to add or remove programs, and it being the case that I had never heard of this Pro Audio setting before trying to fix my internal mic today.
I’m having problems with my microphone today as well. I do not have the “pro mode” option; is that specific to PipeWire? I installed the experimental Pavucontrol package, which has “Microphone (unplugged)” under Input Devices. My laptop only has an internal microphone, so it seems it’s not being detected. In the KDE System Settings, the microphone is listed as an “inactive device.”
I don’t know whether my problem is related to yours. I’ve deleted Pulse config files and uninstalled PulseEffects.
Glad it is not just me at least, must be something weird with an update. That is what it is showing me generally as well, “unplugged” for the internal mic.
I found “Pro Audio” on the configuration section of PAVU, which only has one drop down menu. I did have to install the PipeWire-Pulse package for it to show that.
In my case, I not only lost the microphone, but I also lost the sound on the monitor, which I have connected to the laptop via USB-C power delivery.
Until 2 days ago everything worked without problems.
Apparently, after some unsuccessful automatic update, it became non-functional.
Currently I have to run on Tumbleweed, where it works without problems.
I rolled back to an earlier snapshot to get the microphone back for now. I see that there was an update for “alsa-ucm-conf” that I had installed along with my other software updates. I’m guessing that’s the one that’s doing this as I reinstalled all the other updates, and my microphone is still working.
Should it be reported somehow that there’s a problem with that package?
I can confirm that upgrading the alsa-ucm-conf package was problematic.
I did a downgrade from version 1.2.10-150600.3.5.1 to the former version 1.2.10-150600.1.2 and everything that stopped working, as I mentioned before, is working again.
worked for me as well. Thank you. I never would have found that package on my own, and was hesitant to try just downgrading it in case it broke other dependencies etc. Will just watch for a version past 3.5.1 and hope it works.
It is interesting (to me) reading of alsa-ucm-conf.
That package did not exist over a couple of decades ago when I first started using SuSE (and later openSUSE). I suspect it only appeared relatively recently, where research suggests it was implemented as a way to provide more advanced control over ALSA’s capabilities.
I read it was a response to the growing complexity of audio hardware, particularly on devices like laptops and embedded systems with multiple integrated components.
What does it do? I further read that the UCM files define how to configure a sound card’s mixer for specific tasks (like “headphones,” “mic,” or “speakerphone”). While PulseAudio had its own profile system, the UCM provided a way to standardize this at the ALSA level, so that any application (including PulseAudio) could use it. Supposedly this simplifies things for both hardware vendors and application developers.
I also read that one of the notable changes in PulseAudio’s release notes (specifically PulseAudio 3.0, which was released much later than the initial PulseAudio versions) was the addition of support for the ALSA Use Case Manager. This suggests that the UCM was a later development that PulseAudio then integrated to take advantage of its benefits.
Hence it reads to me that the specific alsa-ucm-conf package and the UCM framework it supports came after PulseAudio’s initial development and adoption.
Some of the forum threads have some ‘real gems’ or pieces of information that I find can be helpful in leaning about GNU/Linux. This is one such thread. Thankyou to all who participated in this thread.
Edit: Looking at its change log I read the first entry: New package, split from alsa-lib since v1.2.1 (dated 15-Nov-2019).