What I recommend is you do a screen dump of your mixer settings, and save that somewhere …
I have the record mixer settings saved as an icon !! (jpeg file) on my wife’s Linux boot partition desktop. She used to always forget the proper linux settings to record, … she would mess them up, and scream at me for Linux being pathetic and not “just working” when it was her who messed up the settings. But the settings are now available as a jpeg file on her destkop, and a single click shows her what the settings should be. She no longer has a problem with recording and I don’t get complaints on that any more.
Just for you to know, once I managed to unmute the channels through amixer (thank you oldcpu!) I decided to uninstall the alsa binaries which I compiled by hand and restore the slackware (old) alsa packages, just to see if it was part of the problem. It turned out that it was not. Everything is still fine right now, with alsa 1.0.18.
Congratulations! Thanks also for the tidbit re: it working with 1.0.18 of alsa.
In your case, I recommend you use the “history | grep amixer” command to recollect what commands you used to unblock your recording, and save that in a text file. And then put that text file somewhere that you will not lose. I keep a folder on my desktop for such useful files (for example userful commands). That way you do not have to struggle again to learn what the syntax might be for amixer.
trying to get microphone working on a latitude E6500 and suse 11.3, I found that the mixer setting needed to have capture (1) on, capture 2 off, input source (1) on digital mic, input source 2 doesn’t care, front jack mode = mic in, mic jack mode = mic in.
in the mixer the only thing which matters is the digital mic level
thanks to poster above who said the mic was the digital mic, I would never have tried it otherwise!
I used krecord’s bar graph to see the input sound level
