Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Making microphone work in Kubuntu Natty

After I switched to Kubuntu Natty 11.04, my microphone stopped working (especially in Skype). I tried to adjust the microphone settings in Phonon System Settings, but, besides having too many devices to choose from, that settings dialog seems to have a bug which prevents the preferences to being saved. Not to mention that there is no way to test the input device from that setting dialog!

Luckily, in that bug report I also found the solution to have microphone work!

The solution consists in installing the package pavucontrol, which provides a comfortable PulseAudio Volume Control dialog, which also gives you immediate feedback to see whether the microphone is working, and reduces the number of devices to choose from!

After you installed that package, Skype options dialog presents a button to open that volume control dialog


If you click the button you'll get the pavucontrol dialog, and in "Input Devices" tab you can choose the input device from the list and instantly check whether that's the right device: just speak in the microphone, and see whether the horizontal bar moves while you're speaking.


That's all! Now you're microphone is set correctly. :)

19 comments:

Jyves said...

Thank you so much, this was very useful and help me solve my Skype problem on Natty.
Cheers.
Jyves.

Anonymous said...

Thx, it solved my microphone problem with skype on kubuntu 11.04

Reinder

Hugo Teixeira said...

Thanks a lot. This was indeed helpful. The PulseAudio app should be installed by default in most linux distributions. Great piece of software.

betto said...

I think that app is indeed installed with gnome, but not with KDE... I guess

Anonymous said...

Thanks!! Solved my problem with mic in skype / kubuntu natty!! Cheers!

Jaroslav Tulach said...

pavucontrol really helps. Thanks for the tip.

TomWitt said...

Thanks HUGELY. This pavucontrol solved my microphone problem on a Dell Inspiron e1505 on Kubuntu 11.04. I can now make calls via Google voice again!

Jinesh K J said...

Huge thanks from me too :-) I have been searching for a solution for so long...

Anonymous said...

so easy and helpful, thanks. Now I'm searchin' for the developers and thank them too.

Sefa Kilic said...

thanks a lot!

$hreya said...

Hey!!

I tried using this method,but even after connecting the microphones under the Input Devices tab says "No input device availible" :(

Please Help!!

$hreya said...

Under tab it says
"no input devices" even though I have microphones attached properly!! :(
Please help

Deep said...

Thank you so much for this :)

betto said...

$heira, any news? I wouldn't know whether your problem is due to real hardware issues (meaning that no driver for you sound device was found)...

Samy said...

That was helpful. Thanks! In different versions of Kubuntu or Skype, it might be a little different, though. I'm using Kubuntu 10.04 LTS (still need to update) and Skype 4.0. The option of volume control didn't show up in the Skype options, so I had to go to Mixer, choose which channels would be visible and then change the volume manualy. I think the mic channels were possibly added there after installing the package you sugested.

Guy S said...

hi there,
i have the same problem with kubuntu 12.04.1 and skype 4.0.
i see your post is fairly old but i thought i would give it a try.
i tried what you did but it didnt solve my problem.
any other idea ??

Unknown said...

works perfect in Kubuntu 12.04
thanks a lot

Unknown said...

$heira, I had the same problem, but fixed it by adjusting the profile under the config tab. I can now use Google chat from Gmail on Kubuntu (previously it only worked on Win7). Thank you very much for this blog post.

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