[NBLUG/talk] Microphones not working in Fedora 8

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Sun Jan 6 16:07:19 PST 2008


On Jan 6, 2008 11:14 AM, Jack Smith <jack.delbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> My microphone seems to have stopped working since I upgraded to Fedora 8.
> One of my problems in testing is that I only ever used it in Ekiga before,
> so I don't know if I'm using rec or Audacity correctly to test it.  I've
> gotten to the point where I don't have any idea what to look at.  Any ideas?

You can just hit the button in Audacity with a circle on it to start
recording, blab into the microphone, then hit the stop button (marked
with a square) to stop recording. You should see a new track with some
sort of wave form appear in the window below the tool bar. If the wave
is perfectly flat, you aren't getting anything from the microphone.

Many distros like to have the microphone turned low by default, and
don't always provide a graphical way to turn it up. If the mixer GUI
is being unhelpful, go to the console and run:

$ alsamixer

Use the left and right arrows to move through items, up and down to
change the current item, tab to cycle from screen to screen, and
Escape to exit.

On the second screen (press tab once) you should see a control labeled
"capture". Move it all the way up to 100. Exit and retry recording in
Audacity.

I have a series of alsamixer screenshots showing all my settings from
the last time I tried to help someone with this. :-) If you're stuck,
I can email them to you to compare against.

Anyway, here's hoping that's all the problem is.

BTW, how do you like working with Ekiga? I started using Skype before
I really looked into the available SIP services.

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

Assembly language experience is [important] for the maturity and
understanding of how computers work that it provides.
                -- D. Gries



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