Thursday, November 23, 2017

How to get your mic working on Ubuntu 9.10


I've been having a hell of a time trying to get my mic to work on my Ubuntu 9.10 machines. Part of the solution I believe is to get the latest ALSA libs, utils and driver and build it. The other part has to do with damn Linux guys often label things funny and provide options that are not really useful or at least are not documented.

Here's the deal, if I run pavucontrol (Pulse Audio Volume Control) and go to the Configuration tab there's a drop down for my Internal Audio. I had it set to Audio Stereo Output. Seemed to make sense to me. But my mic appeared as greyed out in the Input Devices tab. If, however I change it to Audio Stereo Duplex then the mic starts working. I guess it makes sense now that "duplex" means "goes both ways - in an out" but what doesn't make sense really is why would I want the option of making it so that my mic doesn't work (i.e. Audio Stereo Output)?!? I mean if I don't want my mic to be active there's already a mute button!

And on my desktop, which has a 5.1 sound card (and yes I have a 5.1 speaker setup) the option to get my mic working there is to select "Analog Surround 5.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input. Now all I have to do is go out and buy another mic for my desktop - I seem to have lost the last one.

Still haven't gotten HDMI working under Ubuntu 9.1 but I have some things to try out from the Ubuntu forums.

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