Hey guys, I have a dell inspiron 1300 I’ve run suse on for the last six months or so. It has always had a sound issue which until now never bothered me enough to do anything about it. Often when I open a webpage which has sound eg. watching a youtube video or playing a flash game, the first thing out of the speakers is a very harsh grinding sound, not too dissimilar to a spectrum loading, this lasts about half a second and after the incredible trouble I had getting my wifi card working I simply couldn’t be bothered to try to fix it…
Today I found myself needing to record some sound files from my dictaphone onto the laptop via the mic socket, but for some reason whilst recording the sound through audacity there is a shocking delay. By the time the counter on the dictaphone had run to two minutes, the laptop had only recorded 17 seconds of audio. I stopped the feed and yet the laptop sat there happily processing the rest of the audio for a good ten minutes until it completed the track.
Anyone think it may be a driver issue, and if so can anyone offer a solution?
The scratchy noise at the start of youtube has nothing to do with the mic problem IMHO.
Is this audacity specific? What happens if you try to record a sound through arecord ?
When I test my mic, I typically use a simple arecord command. ie something likearecord -d 10 myrecording.wavor
arecord -d 10 -f cd secondrecording.wavwhere “-d 10” sets a 10 second recording. I then play back the recording with xine or mplayer or xmms (or any audio playback program).
The benefit of such a simple test, is there is no other software inbetween, where there could a problem with the software (as opposed to the hardware configuration, or the mixer configuratin).
Reference the mic problem, that is a good description of the symptoms, but you need to provide more information. To provide more information, if using openSUSE-11.1, you can do that, with your PC connected to the internet, by opening a gnome-terminal or a kde konsole and typing “su” (no quotes - enter root password) and then and typing and executing twice :
/usr/sbin/alsa-info.shthe first time it will ask to update. Select YES for the update. The second time that will run a diagnostic script and post the output to a web site on the Internet. It will give you the URL of the web site. Please post that URL here. JUST the URL.
If using openSUSE-11.0 or earlier, instead copy and paste this to a konsole or terminal (with your PC conencted to the internet):
Also, please copy and paste the following commands one line at a time into a gnome-terminal or a konsole and post here the output: rpm -qa | grep alsa
rpm -qa | grep pulse
rpm -q libasound2
uname -a
cat /etc/modprobe.d/sound
That sounds very similar to a problem I had this week.
I installed opensuse 11.1 in my Dell Studio 15 with the Gnome Live CD.
I updated it and installed the KDE desktop, Amarok, etc.
While I was listening shoutcast audio with amarok, I did something, that maybe could have been opening a youtube video, but I am sorry I can’t confirm it. I was using my headphones and I was glad the volume was not a little higher (indeed it was a very reasonable volume) as it almost damaged my ears, it was very close to pain.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) I have not been able to reproduce the problem until now, although I am only using gnome… with other audio issues, but that’s for another topic.
