Hi, Ah, for a peaceful Saturday, but I guess not this one... I'm just starting to investigate this but maybe someone's worked on this sort of thing recently?
The bottom line is that my mic for conferencing is working, in the sense that with headphones on I can raise the either the 'Front Mic' or 'Front Mic Boost' sliders in the KDE mixer and I hear myself speaking. However none of the applications I use the mic with - either Skype or VirtualBox VMs - are receiving any audio. My main method of testing the mic is the little app in Skype where you make a test call and then it plays it back for you. I do love that sweet sounding English girl who talks to me but I don't hear what I recorded. I haven't used the mic in 2 weeks so I only know it was working 2 Saturday's ago. (We didn't have a conference call last Saturday morning.) The kernel was updated from 3.2.1 to 3.2.12 on April 15th, so that's changed since the mix worked. It seems that /var/lib/alsa/asound.state changed as recently as yesterday. (April 20th) The machine is Gentoo (mostly) stable, and has been since it was built 2 years ago, and is updated nearly every day so anything that changed in the last 2 weeks is a possible candidate for root cause. All other aspect of Alsa are basically working. Everything can play audio. KDE system sounds work. VMs can stream NetFlix, etc. The only thing not working at the app level is the mic. Any ideas where to look? I've not rebooted yet on the off chance this is a one-off hardware problem. I have restarted Alsa but it didn't fix anything. If the reboot doesn't work I'll try dropping back to the previous kernel. In the old days you would sometimes delete asound.state and let Alsa recreate it when you had problems with a new version of Alsa. Anyone know if that's still recommended? Thanks in advance, Mark