No Microphone Sound With Skype

[KKvampire]

Just had new notebook with ubuntu 10.4 pre installed, I updated everything but I cant get skype sound sorted, The microphone is not hearing speech. It has this pulse audio in skype and I cant seem to get the mic to pick up sound even in the pulse settings. I dont actually know if the Skype is the problem or the computer sound, I have a Dell notebook and the ubuntu software doesnt give me option to test the microphone sound, Any help or do I have to get windows installed to use Skype? I would rather not ,trying to say goodbye the Windows .

Edited June 29, 2011 by KKvampire

[justsumhelp]

Did you make sure the microphone input in the pulse settings is not on mute?

[dave_boo]

I actually ran into a similar problem under Linux Mint 10 on an Asus UL-80vt. Basically it recognised both the mic in 3,5mm jack and the internal microphone. That is to say that instead of 'marrying' the two together and over-riding the internal one when a microphone was plugged in it recognised them as two seperate devices! And of course it defaulted to the mic in (which also, of course, did not have a microphone plugged in) and I had to go to input devices, select the other microphone (IIRC they were named only slightly differently) and unmute it, play with the gain, etc until I got acceptable levels for Skype.

Much easier under SuSE (where I do net installs and don't litter them with Pulse since I don't have two applications attempting to access the soundcard at the same time--ever) and alsamixer lets me set up the system in a heartbeat.

[dharmabm]

i've run into this problem before. pulseaudio sucks, i never install it, but i wouldn't mess with the pulse settings at all if i were you. open a terminal and run alsamixer and make sure the mic isn't muted first (you may have to hit <tab> to get to the second screen. pulse SHOULD automatically pick up whatever your alsa settings are. if that doesn't work, i recall that my solution was to install ubuntu's audio-backports package. i'm guessing you have an intel sound chip, but let us know more detail if necessary. there is a LOT of documentation in the ubuntu forums about this, it's a pretty common problem. oh, and you should have something called sound recorder in your audio applications menu which can verify if it is just skype or not.

k

[KKvampire]

i've run into this problem before. pulseaudio sucks, i never install it, but i wouldn't mess with the pulse settings at all if i were you. open a terminal and run alsamixer and make sure the mic isn't muted first (you may have to hit <tab> to get to the second screen. pulse SHOULD automatically pick up whatever your alsa settings are. if that doesn't work, i recall that my solution was to install ubuntu's audio-backports package. i'm guessing you have an intel sound chip, but let us know more detail if necessary. there is a LOT of documentation in the ubuntu forums about this, it's a pretty common problem. oh, and you should have something called sound recorder in your audio applications menu which can verify if it is just skype or not.

k

Thanks I installed the gnome alsamixer from the software centre , but no luck even adjusted the microphone settings. Im not sure if I have intel sound chip. I have AMD Vision processor witha DELL Inspiron 4010 notebook. I looked at the options for audio backports package but there are so many available wouldnt know which one to install. I have looked at the Ubuntu forums but there are so many different problems and solutions or non solutions on there its not helped me. Hope you can assist in some way. Im in thailand

[Cloggie]

If you live in Bangkok, join us next week in Sukhumvit Soi 8, Soi 8 Bar - Bangkok.

See: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/409242-ubuntu-it-meeting/

If they can't solve it, nobody can....

Cheers,

Cloggie

[higgy88]

For whatever this is worth, I had been running Ubuntu 10.10 on a bootable flash drive and had used it on several computers without any problems except for my daughter's Asus eeePC notebook, where the mic did not work same as yours. I played around with trying to get it to work, with no luck, but I must admit that I didn't try all that hard. When I updated my flash drive to Ubuntu 11.04, the problem was fixed.

You may want to consider updating your Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.04, and I would suggest a fresh install.