[Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

Pascal V. · 2013-11-23 20:01:35

Hi there,

I'm trying to make the internal microphone of my laptop work, with no success until now however.

First of all, when I try a livecd of mint, fedora or ubuntu it does work in all of them.
Since I thought it was an alsa configuration problem, I decided to save asound.state (from /var/lib/alsa) on my usb key and put it on my arch installation. It solved another problem (I had a led corresponding to the microphone being muted that was always on that I wanted to disable) but it did not change a thing conserning the recording of sound.

When I try, on arch:

 arecord test.wav

It does not record anything and when I quit it, it gives the message error "pcm_read:2031: read error: system call interrupted" which it did not in the different livecds I tried.

Does anyone have an idea ?

Pascal

Last edited by Pascal V. (2013-11-24 17:17:42)

Pascal V. · 2013-11-24 17:16:13

Well I sort of solved it : installing pulseaudio made it work. I don't consider this a real solve though since it should theoretically be working also with only alsa.

ewtoombs · 2014-02-16 04:12:45

My alsa system won't capture sound either. I have no idea what's going on. I tried arecord -f cd test.wav and I got back nothing.

This is my audio device:

00:07.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP72XE/MCP72P/MCP78U/MCP78S High Definition Audio (rev a1)

The driver it uses is snd_intel_hda. It used to work just fine until quite recently. Maybe a few weeks ago. So I know all of the settings are all right. Capture is unmuted, the mic boost is on, and I have the right mic input selected for capture. Still nothing. I have absolutely no idea what could be causing this.

I don't consider pulseaudio a solution either. I have no intention of "fixing" this with pulseaudio. It is completely unnecessary for all but the most exotic of sound setups. dmix works just fine.

Last edited by ewtoombs (2014-02-16 04:13:44)

Pascal V. · 2014-02-16 07:31:25

In the end I did not manage to find another solution, although I have to admit I didn't look much for it. But I wonder what can cause this and which parameter is changed by pulse to make it work.

ConnorBehan · 2014-02-16 08:46:27

Is everything unmuted if you run "alsamixer" and hit F5?

Pascal V. · 2014-02-16 09:27:13

Everything was, and I tried different volume settings. I remember I had tried with a livecd of ubuntu/mint and it worked out of the box, but the mixers weren't even all the same ones (and there were some other differences, it also turned off an annoying led, that I finally have gotten used to).

ewtoombs · 2014-03-12 06:47:58

ConnorBehan wrote:

Is everything unmuted if you run "alsamixer" and hit F5?

Everything is unmuted. One day it was working, an the next it stopped. That was the first thing I checked when audio capture stopped working.

I'm trying pulseaudio now. We'll see how it goes.

ewtoombs · 2014-03-12 08:14:53

Yep, accessing the microphone through pulseaudio works, but not through dmix/alsa.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-11-23 20:01:35

[Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

#2 2013-11-24 17:16:13

Re: [Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

#3 2014-02-16 04:12:45

Re: [Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

#4 2014-02-16 07:31:25

Re: [Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

#5 2014-02-16 08:46:27

Re: [Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

#6 2014-02-16 09:27:13

Re: [Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

#7 2014-03-12 06:47:58

Re: [Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

#8 2014-03-12 08:14:53

Re: [Solved... sort of] Alsa cannot capture sound

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