[pulseaudio-discuss] Microphone Confusion

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Robert Stone at 07/06/11 05:06 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi,
> 
> A few days ago I could use Skype normally. Today the microphone is not
> working. The video is working and I can see and hear the person I'm
> calling. The Skype sound test is negative.
> Pulseaudio manager seems to think that my webcam is my audio input. It
> doesn't seem to want to recognise the microphone on the headset.

Pulseaudio manager is pretty much completely useless tool. It's really
just a debug tool nothing more (and generally for debugging I prefer
pacmd list anyway as we can give that output on mailing lists and IRC etc.)

Use pavucontrol. It's the main mixer app. When Skype is recording, you
will see a stream under the "Recording" tab and will be able to move the
stream from the device it's chosen to the device you want to use.

But please note that from the screenshot, it seems you've picked a
output only digital profile for your headset. You can adjust profiles in
the "Configuration" tab of pavucontrol. I suspect that the headset is
just reporting that it can handle digital audio when it cannot and thus
the sound is just effectively going to /dev/null. As this is an output
only profile, the headsets mic is essentially not displayed or used.

Just pick a more sensible profile in either pavucontrol or
gnome-volume-control or KDE's speaker setup.

> Could somebody please give me a few clues as where to look for this
> problem.

Hopefully the above is the info you need but feel free to ask more
questions or pop by on IRC if you're still stuck.

All the best

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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