Comment 25 for bug 354707

The trick proposed by David Travis worked for me though looking at it it does make sense (no reason to mute Front Mic at 100 % level) ; now I can use Skype and Audacity with a microphone ; all this is not really satisfactory ; here are a few remarks :
(1) I use as proposed by David gnome-volume-control under KDE but I imagine alsa-mixer could also works as well ; however the problem is that when running gnome-volume-control in console mode if I close gnome-volume-control (Ctrl D) and repoen it all the setting is still there except that the microphon is MUTED ; we can here that there is a bug because I do no see any reason to loose some features as set in settings whichever the mixer I use ; of course re-opening a session shows the same problem : microphone is MUTED ; as here I am using a KDE session it might be due an incompatibility between KMix and gnome-volume-control but normally not except if PulseAudio is interfering here.
(2) gnome-volume-control is very confusing in Playback we have :
- Front Mic
- Front Mic Boost
- Micro
- Mic Boost
this for me is beyond my comprehension.
(3) aumix shows a record setting but even when gnome-volume-control in Record tab shows a MUTED microphone recording is still on in aumix
(4) KMix shows only playback features but there is no tab for record features where you can select a source input or a level of record as it used to do.
(5) I tried to recompile alsa 1.0.20 but without the trick proposed by David I had the same probem at to my microphone.

I am using a X2 64 bit machine.

I will pursue my tests with Gnome to check whether sond settings are kept from one session to another.
Regards.