Microphone doesn't work anymore after upgrade to Karmic

[Francisco]

There is no control for any capture device in alsamixer. Microphone is working (it does output microphone-captured sound out of the loudspeakers), but since I cannot set the volume for the capture device, recording doesn't work.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: franjesus 2100 F.... pulseaudio
 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p: franjesus 2100 F...m pulseaudio
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'Intel'/'HDA Intel at 0xfebfc000 irq 29'
   Mixer name : 'Realtek ALC660'
   Components : 'HDA:10ec0861,10430000,00100340 HDA:15433155,10431335,00100700'
   Controls : 15
   Simple ctrls : 9
Date: Sun Nov 1 16:25:02 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: alsa-base 1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu5
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=es_ES.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: alsa-driver
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic x86_64

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Why not use alsamixer in a Terminal to adjust it?

[Francisco (franjesus)]

As I said, there are no capture controls in alsamixer.

Open alsamixer, press F4, nothing shows up, not a single bar or boolean control.

I'm trying to update alsa-driver to 1.0.21 directly from upstream to see if it is fixed already. Otherwise I'll have to downgrade.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

That's because for your codec 'Capture' is exposed as a *playback*
element, not a *capture*.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Sorry, I meant 'Mic' not 'Capture'.

[Francisco (franjesus)]

I am not a sound hacker, but usually Mic is exposed both as playback and as capture. It used to be like that from feisty to jaunty, at least.

BWT, 1.0.21 is still broken.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

It's a shame you installed 1.0.21, because I would have recommended
you try installing linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic, which
is newer than 1.0.21 (it's a snapshot of alsa-driver stable from
20091012).

[Francisco (franjesus)]

I had that package already installed, in fact the bug was generated against that version. I didn't know it was more recent than the official stable release. All 3 versions show the same behaviour then.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

I think Linux kernel 2.6.33-rc5 will help you. The release notes contain the following comment:

Date: Thu Jan 14 12:39:02 2010 +0100

    ALSA: hda - Fix missing capture mixer for ALC861/660 codecs

    The capture-related mixer elements are missing with ALC861/ALC660 codecs
    when quirks are present, due to missing call of set_capture_mixer().

    Reference: Novell bnc#567340
     http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=567340

    Signed-off-by: Takashi Iwai

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Francisco,

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 linux 468790

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.

    [This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Brad Figg (brad-figg)]

This bug was filed against a series that is no longer supported and so is being marked as Won't Fix. If this issue still exists in a supported series, please file a new bug.

This change has been made by an automated script, maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team.