I have developed an issue with my internal microphone, which worked well for many years. Starting about a week ago, it only records static. I run Debian on a ThinkPad X280.
The only way in which I am now able to make it record normally is by using Audacity and selecting "sysdefault" as the recording device: that tells me it's not a hardware error. In some cases, this recording device option does not even show up when I start Audacity: it sometimes only shows "default" and "pulse" as the options. So there is clearly something going on there behind the scenes as well that I don't understand.
The microphone doesn't work in any other setting, such as in Zoom.
Please let me know if there are any particular commands whose output would help diagnose the problem. Thank you very much!
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Internal mic only recording static
Re: Internal mic only recording static
What DE are you using? Gnome? KDE? Other?
Did you check you DE settings to set the correct option?
Did you check you DE settings to set the correct option?
Re: Internal mic only recording static
Thanks for the reply!
I am using Xfce. I have checked the GUI ("pavucontrol") available in the desktop environment and everything seems to be correct there: the internal microphone is selected as an input device, it is not muted and it's turned up to 100%. See attached image. You can also see that there is some signal that the microphone is receiving (the blue bar), but that's just static.
I am using Xfce. I have checked the GUI ("pavucontrol") available in the desktop environment and everything seems to be correct there: the internal microphone is selected as an input device, it is not muted and it's turned up to 100%. See attached image. You can also see that there is some signal that the microphone is receiving (the blue bar), but that's just static.
- Screenshot_2022-08-30_12-15-31.png (169.87 KiB) Viewed 1018 times
Re: Internal mic only recording static
I can narrow down the problem as likely related to Pulseaudio: I tried removing it and the microphone works fine (in programs such as Zoom). Unfortunately, re-installing it also reintroduces the problem. I hope that's helpful.