I’ve fought long (and rather half-arsedly, admittedly) to get sound recording working on my eee pc 900, running ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Primarily this was so that I could get skype chat working.

Symptoms include:

  • despite adjusting all levels in XFCE4-mixer, no audio would record through any apps (such as arecord, audacity or skype)
  • input from microphone could be heard through speakers/headphones. for example, blowing on the mic would cause noise to come out of speakers/headphones

Rather frustrating, since mics (both built in, and external) clearly worked, just no recording.

One strange behaviour that i noted was that the ‘capture’ slider in XFCE4-Mixer would, no matter how adjusted, always set back to zero automatically.

The trick, it seems, is to:

  • go into alsamixer,
  • tab to the inputs grouping,
  • move the cursor to the ‘capture’ control
  • hit ‘space’ to change ‘——’ to ‘CAPTUR’

it seems that capture is a switch as well as a control, and XFCE4-mixer doesn’t know this. It is by default set to off, hence the problem. switching it to on (‘CAPTUR’ as above) fixes everything!

Hopefully this will help someone out some how.

Phil

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