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An analogy:
How do you quickly test if audio/sound is working properly in your computer? Pretty easy, just open an audio player and open a music file on it. Alternatively, run `speaker-test` from the alsa-utils package.
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Now, I'm searching for an analogous way to do that for the microphone. My current way is not very efficient: I open audacity, tap the 'record' button, then speak until I see something different. While I speak, I try to tweak something on pavucontrol, alsamixer or on other programs.
The question is: under Arch, is there a better / faster / easier way to test if the microphone is working properly? I'm interested mostly on a binary answer: it is working / it is not working. No need to see the volume of the capture. A package, a program or a procedure would be highly appreciated.
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PS1.: Audacity is not the best way also because it has several input sources; so I have to occasionally stop the recording, change the input source and then recording again, until I get the microphone working.
PS2.: Motivations for this post are because the built-in microphone of my laptop doesn't always work. I'm trying to troubleshoot this to (maybe) create a new post later on with useful info, but at the moment I'm just interested in a way to quickly test a microphone, not to configure one. Thanks.
Last edited by thiagowfx (2015-04-24 17:38:00)
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Have you tried http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=258562 ?
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As it says at the end of the link karol share, you can use:
arecord -d 5 test-mic.wav
Say or play something and then use:
aplay test-mic.wav
if its working you should heard something with the aplay code.
"Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today" - James Dean
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They suggested an even easier way:
arecord -vv -fdat foo.wav
which I would improve to
arecord -vv -f dat /dev/null
or
arecord -vvv -f dat /dev/null
Even if you tap the mic, you can see the activity meter in the verbose output.
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Thanks karol, this is what I was after.
This becomes more reusable by creating an alias or a shell function:
test-microphone() {
arecord -vvv -f dat /dev/null
}
I'll mark it as solved.
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I'll mark it as solved.
Promises, promises ...
;-)
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