[gentoo-user] Mic works, but doesn't work...

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   Ah, for a peaceful Saturday, but I guess not this one...  I'm just
starting to investigate this but maybe someone's worked on this sort
of thing recently?

   The bottom line is that my mic for conferencing is working, in the
sense that with headphones on I can raise the either the 'Front Mic'
or 'Front Mic Boost' sliders in the KDE mixer and I hear myself
speaking. However none of the applications I use the mic with - either
Skype or VirtualBox VMs - are receiving any audio. My main method of
testing the mic is the little app in Skype where you make a test call
and then it plays it back for you. I do love that sweet sounding
English girl who talks to me but I don't hear what I recorded.

   I haven't used the mic in 2 weeks so I only know it was working 2
Saturday's ago. (We didn't have a conference call last Saturday
morning.) The kernel was updated from 3.2.1 to 3.2.12 on April 15th,
so that's changed since the mix worked. It seems that
/var/lib/alsa/asound.state changed as recently as yesterday. (April
20th)

   The machine is Gentoo (mostly) stable, and has been since it was
built 2 years ago, and is updated nearly every day so anything that
changed in the last 2 weeks is a possible candidate for root cause.

   All other aspect of Alsa are basically working. Everything can play
audio. KDE system sounds work. VMs can stream NetFlix, etc. The only
thing not working at the app level is the mic.

   Any ideas where to look?

   I've not rebooted yet on the off chance this is a one-off hardware
problem. I have restarted Alsa but it didn't fix anything. If the
reboot doesn't work I'll try dropping back to the previous kernel.

   In the old days you would sometimes delete asound.state and let
Alsa recreate it when you had problems with a new version of Alsa.
Anyone know if that's still recommended?

Thanks in advance,
Mark