Skype and my Microphone

Not having any trouble with Skype and my laptop's microphone ever, this time when I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (I know this seems out-dated when 10.04 is out, but I installed it in mid April when my 9.10 crashed twice!) I could not send my voice to the other end. My family said that they could hear me sometimes in between but mostly I felt dumb and just used facial expressions, sign language or text chat to convey my feelings.

But I had to find out a way to push my voice through my microphone into the Internet to my family. So I resorted to find a solution. Being a researcher I would also give references of those links that helped me :)

From [1] I had to change my /etc/esound/esd.conf file which I later realized did not solve the purpose! But it gave me a useful link to [2], the Ubuntu Documentation for Debugging Sound Problems, in which the Section on Getting Line Input to work (Microphone etc) [3] details about how to go about playing with Alsamixer (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, ALSA, [4]) and Pavumeter (Pulse Audio Volume Meter).

What I did:

$ sudo apt-get install pavumeter
$ pavumeter --record

This opens a window to see the voices the system is detecting. In my case, no voice was detected except the usual noise!

Then following the steps given in [2]:

$ alsamixer -c 0

1. Press F4 to get to the capture console.
2. Make sure the first capture channel is enabled ("CAPTUR" in red, press space to toggle), and the volume turned up.
3. Check the first input source is switched to your chosen plug (Mic, in my case)

No effect, but yes, read between the lines: They said "in my case" so on playing around I found out that in My case "Front Mi" works instead of "Mic"! And first ray of hope, Pavumeter is detecting my voice!!!

Next step was figuring out whether this works with Skype too, and not much to my shock, it did NOT! What surprised me though was the behavior of Pavumeter and Alsamixer to the Skype test call I made. As soon as the call started, the right mic's meter shoots to the maximum possible value and on the other hand Alsamixer's first CAPTUR's volume starts to decrease linearly as the call progresses.

A quick and obvious solution to this was holding down the UP key of the keyboard and keeping the volume to its maximum value. As soon as I leave the key, it starts to fall down again?!?

Don't know how, but after rebooting this is somehow solved and I now need not 'always' press the UP key. Some presses make it somehow adapted to my requirements I think, nice Machine Learning!!!

Lets test this during my next weekend video chat with my parents, hope this one works out well!!! :) Though now the automatic decrease in CAPTUR's volume is not observed (I just checked it again before asserting!) as seen in the screenshot below:



In the meanwhile if any of the readers finds a solution to the problem, or has a similar problem, do post here, I'd surely like to help!

REFERENCES:

[1] http://jadmadi.net/blog/2007/12/27/ubuntu-gutsy-skype-microphone/

[2] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting?action=show&redirect=DebuggingSoundProblems

[3] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting?action=show&redirect=DebuggingSoundProblems#Getting%20Line%20Input%20to%20work%20%28Microphone,%20etc%29

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsamixer :-)