Lenovo X1 Carbon 2nd gen: Microphone not working in GTK (GStreamer?) apps

[Till Kamppeter]

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (2nd gen, 2014?) running Ubuntu Yakkety (16.10). Kernel is the most current one: 4.8.0-39-generic #42-Ubuntu

In the last days the microphone stopped working when I am on the Google Hangouts video conference in the Chromium browser. I checked the sound settings of the System Settings and on the "input" tab the slider for the microphone volume is grayed out and cannot be moved away from the zero position. The microphone level monitor bar does not move when talking or touching the microphone.

Then I found the following on the internet

http://askubuntu.com/questions/508221/sound-input-device-microphone-not-working

and tried to solve the problem following the hints:

- Reboot does not solve the problem.

- I could not do any tests with gstreamer-properties as it seems to have been removed from gstreamer (what is the successor?).

- pavucontrol (Pulse Audio Sound Control) shows on its "Input Devices" Tab that the microphone of the laptop is OK and that the kernel works with it. The Level monitor bar is moving according to environment noise and touching of the microphone.

- "sudo alsa force-reload" does not solve the problem.

- "sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio; sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio ubuntu-desktop" and reboot afterwards does not solve the problem.

- audacity is recording through the microphone correctly.

- Adding "options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1" to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and rebooting does not solve the problem.

I hope that is a known problem. Please tell me if you need further information.
---
ApportVersion: 2.20.3-0ubuntu8.2
Architecture: amd64
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: till 2897 F.... pulseaudio
 /dev/snd/controlC1: till 2897 F.... pulseaudio
CurrentDesktop: Unity
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.10
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-04-30 (686 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" - Release amd64 (20150422)
Package: pulseaudio 1:9.0-2ubuntu2.1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.8.0-42.45-generic 4.8.17
Tags: yakkety third-party-packages
Uname: Linux 4.8.0-42-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UserGroups: adm cdrom dip libvirt libvirtd lpadmin plugdev sambashare sudo wireshark
_MarkForUpload: True
dmi.bios.date: 09/02/2014
dmi.bios.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.bios.version: GRET40WW (1.17 )
dmi.board.asset.tag: Not Available
dmi.board.name: 20A8X50300
dmi.board.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.board.version: SDK0E50512 STD
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: No Asset Information
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.chassis.version: Not Available
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnLENOVO:bvrGRET40WW(1.17):bd09/02/2014:svnLENOVO:pn20A8X50300:pvrThinkPadX1Carbon2nd:rvnLENOVO:rn20A8X50300:rvrSDK0E50512STD:cvnLENOVO:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
dmi.product.name: 20A8X50300
dmi.product.version: ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2nd
dmi.sys.vendor: LENOVO

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Luke, I have followed your instructions of PuleAudio logging during system startup on

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log

After booting the system I got 4 log files which I will attach.

The "Input Volume" on the "Input" tab of the Unity Sound Settings is still grayed out.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Any idea what to do here? Any additional info needed?

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Are any of those logs taken from when you are trying to use the microphone or when you try and adjust the settings for it in control-center?

If not, try getting a log when trying to use both pavucontrol and unity-control-center to change microphone settings, since you did indicate that pavucontrol was at least showing something.

Could you also run apport-collect 1667328 so I can get some info about your actual hardware?

Thanks.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

apport information

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

apport information

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

apport information

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

apport information

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

apport information

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

apport information

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Today I had connected to a Google Hangout video conference again (via Chromium Browser) and the microphone was not working again and the microphone volume slider on the "input" tab of the sound part of the System Settings was still grayed out. On the "Applications" tab there were three sliders for Chromium, all active, including one input slider, put moving around this slider ("Mute" was not checked) did not make the microphone work either.

The conference was from shortly after 11am until shortly after 12pm.

I attach the appropriate log files from the /tmp directory.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Now I have run pavucontrol and checked the microphone input under "Input devices" and there one sees the microphone level moving dependent on noise and knocking against the microphone. It can also be influenced by the slider. With pavucontrol open the microphone level slider in the sound part of System Settings still stays grayed out.

By this operation only /tmp/pulseverbose.log.1 got new entries. So I have attached this file again.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Any additional info needed for this?

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Ok, I see pavucontrol changing the volume, and I see the control center connecting, but I don't see anything about it not being able to change the microphone volume, same with Chromium. Are you able to change the microphone volume with the sound indicator?

One thing you could try, is to move your pulseaudio configuration out of the way temporarily to see if that resolves things. The best time to do this is when not logged into a graphical session, and do the move in a console. You want to move ~/.config/pulse out of the way. Once done, try the control center, and chromium again. No need to test pavucontrol, we know that its working.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Thank you very much. I got it working again this way.

So I will attach my old (not working) .config/pulse/ directory and the new working one. So you can compare and find out what probably broke it.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 16.10 (yakkety) reached end-of-life on July 20, 2017.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

After applying the workaround of comment #21, the problem never occurred again for me.

To the maintainer of the pulseaudio Ubuntu package: Are you still investigating on this?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gstreamer (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for pulseaudio (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]