I have an HP Pavilion G60-249WM laptop, and the internal (infernal?) mic has never worked under any flavor of Linux I’ve tried, going back to Ubuntu 9.04, either 32bit or 64bit versions. This pretty much leads me to believe it’s a problem with ALSA and/or PulseAudio. I’ve tried all the tweaks and tinkers I’ve found on this (and many other) forums, all to no avail.
We suggest you install the application called pavucontrol, The PulseAudio Volume Control and then go to the Input Device Tab and select the Mic port and un-mute the device. Now you have to have some application it is inputting to like Audicity perhaps to test it out. It should show up in the application Tab I think if it works with Pulse. It does boil down to what do you want to use your Mic with?
Done it and done it. It’s unmuted (though on boot up it automatically mutes itself again, which is what you see here) and both volume and boost are cranked up as far as they go. arecord and skype both hear nothing.
Oddly enough, I followed another post to completely disable pulseaudio, thinking that might do it, and it’s still running which I find incredibly strange.
According to the diagnostic script, only one mic is present:
ARECORD
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: CONEXANT Analog [CONEXANT Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
which is hw:0,0
if you try to record with:
arecord -vv -f S16_LE -c 2 -D hw:0,0 new.wav
and stop the recording with does that record with your internal, or with an external mic ? That is supposed to create the file ‘new.wav’ that you can play back with an audio player. ie
aplay new.wav
pay attention to the arecord errors (if any) as they give important information. I have 2 channels in my example ( -c 2 ) but it is possible one channel is better ( -c 1 ) .
Now I note from the script your hardware audio codec is a Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa). My guess is that the Conexant 20561 (Hermosa) is the same as the Conexant 5051. If one looks inside the alsa documentation in the HD-Audio-Models.txt file, one will see these model options for a Conexant 5051 in version 1.0.24 of alsa:
Conexant 5051
=============
laptop Basic Laptop config (default)
hp HP Spartan laptop
hp-dv6736 HP dv6736
hp-f700 HP Compaq Presario F700
lenovo-x200 Lenovo X200 laptop
toshiba Toshiba Satellite M300
So you can also try to force one of those listed audio configurations to see if that provides a superior internal mic recording capability. I recommend each one be tried one at a time. Lets say you try ‘toshiba’, then you simply edit the /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf file adding this line to the start of the file :
options snd-hda-intel model=toshiba
save the change and restart alsa sound driver. You can do that by rebooting or by running with root permissions ‘rcalsastart restart’ and then as a regular user restart your mixer. If using kde and asked if you wish to keep an old configuration answer no. Then test your sound and test your mic. Some of those configurations may break your sound, others may make no difference. Just keep trying. ie to try ‘hp’ then just replace ‘toshiba’ in that edit with ‘hp’, restart your alsa sound driver, and test.
and rebooting, then enabling the internal mic volume sliders in the mixer and tweaking the levels was all it took. Going to make sure I save this little tidbit for later!
Great ! Thanks for sharing your solution. Its good to know that for an HP Pavilion G60-249WM laptop (as seems to be known as a HP G60 Notebook PC (F.35)) that one needs to edit the /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf file, adding at the start the line:
