Lenovo G560: Internal microphone stopped working

[erget]

Hello all,

I've got a handy new Lenovo G560 running with OpenSUSE 11.3 64-bit. After a normal out-of-the-box installation the laptop speakers failed to mute when I plugged in headphones and I was only able to regulate the sound for both the speakers and the headphones simultaneously. Then I installed a whole lot of ALSA stuff and my sound devices were recognized as "PulseAudio server (local)". Speakers muted when I plugged in headphones - a big yay.

Now, though, my microphone doesn't work any more. It worked before, I'd talked on Skype with it, but upon trying to make a call with Skype today I noticed that it didn't work any more. Sound's turned up in KMix, so everything should be okay - does anybody know how to get my microphone working again? Thanks!

Best,
Daniel

[gogalthorp]

Look in the mixer/vol control widget and see if the microphone is muted also be sure that the capture control is checked and the volume is up.

Also may check in Yast and be sure things are correctly set for the sound card/ I'm guessing you have KDE installed so go to Personal settings Multi Media and check out things there.

Oops forgot if you do not see the capture control you can add it from the setting menu in the Kmix window

[erget]

In my mixer (KMix, although it says "HDA Intel" in the window title bar) the microphone is turned up to about 75% with 20db mic boost. Capture's turned on.

In Personal Settings: Multimedia I've got the strange situation that I described that all my audio devices are recognized as "PulseAudio server". That means also the audio capture device. Seems strange, because my microphone should probably be recognized as something else, right?

[erget]

Hi, I'm sorry to bug, but does anybody have an idea of how I could solve this problem? The mic's still not working.

[gogalthorp]

Are you tunning KDE? If so check the multimedia settings there.

[erget]

Yep, I'm running KDE. To sum it up so it's all in one post:
OpenSUSE 11.3 64-bit KDE on Lenovo G560

My multimedia settings only register one device, and that's the PulseAudio Sound Server. On the tab "Device Preference" I only see that one device for each audio output and audio capture use. I've checked the box to show advanced devices. Under the "Backend" tab I've got Xine, deinterlacing for DVD using the method use_vo_driver, although I assume the backend stuff's not relevant.

In my PulseAudio Volume Control I've got one device under the tab "Input Devices," it's called "Internal Audio Analog Stereo" and is turned up but not registering any input. In PulseAudio Manager it's described under the "Devices" tab as "alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo" as both a sink and a source.

[lucoli]

Hi!
I've got same problem with my lenovo G560.
I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 and the internal microphone is not working anymore.
It is important to notice that at the beginning it was working as normal. Trying to solve the problem with headphones which didn't exclude the external speakers when plugged in, something changed and I've lost the internal mic.
Did you find some solution in the meantime?
Thank you,
Luca

[erget]

Hey there,

Nope, haven't found a solution, but in the meantime I've honesty said pretty much given it up - have been busy with other things. Your reply is interesting, though, because it describes the exact same problem - headphones don't exclude internal speakers, and once that's fixed the internal microphone doesn't work any more - and with Ubuntu instead of OpenSUSE... So I guess the problem is independent of distribution. Interesting...

Anybody else have any tips as to what could be the cause!
Daniel

[lucoli]

The strange thing is that if you go back and cancel the procedure to solve the headphone problem, the mic still remain mute.

Yes, I think it is something related with this particular laptop model and any linux distribution.

Hope someone else would be able to find a solution.

Cheers.