Webcam Microphone not working

Hi,

recently I found that the microphone of my trusted Logitec C270 USB-Webcam was not detected by my system anymore. The most obvious symptom is that after connecting PulseAudio will show that there is no recording device. I could verify that it is not a hardware issue by trying on a different system. Since then I have spent quite some time working through related posts and trying out various things but unfortunately nothing helped.

FYI here the entry shown by arecord -l:

Karte 2: U0x46d0x825 [USB Device 0x46d:0x825], Gerät 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Sub-Geräte: 1/1
  Sub-Gerät #0: subdevice #0

Also I found the following error in /var/log/messages when connecting the camera:

pulseaudio[3282]: E: [pulseaudio] module-alsa-card.c: Failed to find a working profile.
 pulseaudio[3282]: E: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-card" (argument: "device_id="2" name="usb-046d_0825_45A3C840-02" card_name="alsa_card.usb-046d_0825_45A3C840-02" namereg_fail=false tsched=yes fixed_latency_range=no ignore_dB=no deferred_volume=yes use_ucm=yes avoid_resampling=no card_properties="module-udev-detect.discovered=1""): initialization failed.

Luckily I could narrow down when something must have changed: On January 11th things were working fine but on January 23rd the microphone was gone. According to zypper history there were no changes to alsa or pulseaudio packagesin that timeframe. There has been an update to kernel-default to 5.3.18-lp152.60.1 on January 15th. Having ran out of other ideas I tried booting into the previous kernel (5.3.18-lp152.57.1) - and to my surprise the microphone was back there.

With this background is there anything I can do in order to get the camera’s microphone working with the current kernel? Or is the best workaround to use a different kernel version when I need the microphone?

Thanks in advance!

The best way is creating bug report and helping developers with finding solution.

Use prefix to get english output:

LANG=C arecord -l

There are multiple bugreports:
https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1181097
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1181323
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1181014

Can you use it with the old kernel?
You can start with them in the Grub2 login by going down to the second entry.

Thanks for the feedback.

Ah thanks, that’s exactly my problem. I had done some quick searching but had not found those. Obviously my search strategy was wrong.

Yes, the old kernel works and yes, using it from Grub works as well. It’s just that I tend to forget it sometimes so I am glad that it will be fixed with some upcoming update.

Thanks a lot for sharing, I had already wondered how that would work :wink: