Low mic volume when calling on ekiga

[Ram Yalamanchili]

I am using an Acer Aspire One 110 netbook. The mic volume when using Gnome-sound recorder is just fine, but ekiga's mic setup is extremely low volume. The only thing i can hear is crackling echo if i blow air into the mic directly (when i call ekiga's echo test).

I tried this with the same results for both Default and Intel HDA devices for Input Devices. I am attacking the debug output to this bug.

The OS is ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. Also, note that I uninstalled pulseaudio from this system.

[Yannick Defais (sevmek)]

Thank you for coming on IRC.

The audio setup seems fine. This is not a network issue. Pushing this upstream.

Best regards,
Yannick

[Yannick Defais (sevmek)]

Well, digging this up, it seems various people do have issue with the microphone using acer aspire one. I'm not sure if it is ALSA or Ekiga issue.

[Ram Yalamanchili (ramyinc)]

I found a fix for the issue. On Acer Aspire One A110 netbooks, the following seems to work:

arecord -vv -f S16_LE -c2 -r8000 -d 5 test.wav; aplay test.wav

But this didn't:
arecord -vv -f S16_LE -c1 -r8000 -d 5 test.wav; aplay test.wav

On further investigation, it seems somehow having the Capture volume fields in alsamixer "linked" together is causing the issue. I unlinked them both by setting the left channel to 60% and the right channel to 0%. This fixed the above issue of recording with -c1.

Ekiga also works just fine with this setting. I think this bug needs to be passed onto the alsa maintainer since it seems like wrong behavior that mic recording is affected by Capture's individual channel volume levels.

[Yannick Defais (sevmek)]

As a new configuration of ALSA solve the issue, attributing the bug to alsa.

[Brad Figg (brad-figg)]

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p alsa-base 412106

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

No response to comment #6 which was over 12 years ago so closing