cant record sound in fedora 4!

[rocketpcguy]

i played with alsamixer to death (the microphone is UNMUTED!). i can hear the microphone clearly with my headphones, but i cannot get audacity to krec to hear anything. i put the microphone as the recording source in kmix, but the same thing!

creative emu10k1 with ALSA drivers

and what other recording programs are there in fedora 4?

[dkeav]

might try muting the device but turning the volume up

[rocketpcguy]

tried that, didnt work :(

i booted into windows, and it works just fine. but in linux, i can hear myself, but the application cant, so i cant record myself.

any ideas?

[JamminJoeyB]

Check the prefernces in Audacity. You may have missed a setting in there. The last time I needed to record something I had to play around in alsamixer for quite a while to find the right control to record from line in.

Remember there are three views in alsamixer. Output, input and ALL. I might have those modes names wrong, but I know there are three. Check to make sure you are actually adjusting the input/record control.

[bwkaz]

Remember there are three views in alsamixer. Output, input and ALL. I might have those modes names wrong, but I know there are three. Check to make sure you are actually adjusting the input/record control. And to switch between views, you would use the Tab key. ;)

[banzaikai]

Boy, it's a small world...

After fighting with this exact problem on both my FC4 boxes (with different sound cards, so that's not the problem), I figured it out.

First, in Audacity, do you see any widget next to the speaker/mic level sliders that says "Line" (see attachment)? If not, then you have the same problem. What happened is that the things Audacity needed weren't included in the install (a GTK library of some sort).

Next, open up a terminal and su to root. Enter:

yum remove audacity

and after it does, we re-install it with:

yum install audacity

after thinking about it for a bit, it'll list both audacity and those pesky little things that weren't installed along with it. Hit "Y" and continue. After the install, you can either "yum clean all" or just exit the terminal.

Re-launch Audacity, and you'll now see the input select widget next to the sliders. Just drop-down to the MIC input, and you should then be able to click on the mic icon to view the level meter above.

Tip: Adjust for a max of -3dB, as hitting 0dB will clip the signal - unlike analog recording where you could fudge things a bit. Also, my on-board VIA sound was really crappy compared to my C-Media sound card. Let me know how well your emu10k1 does with all this, as I'm looking to replace the VIA.

banzai "CrO2" kai

[rocketpcguy]

the widget was already there, it didn't help.

however, the problem is fixed!! luckily, my motherboad has an onboard sound card also, and pluging in my headphone/microphone there and using that works perfectly.

[rocketpcguy]

BUT the microphone sound is very low compared to the emu10k1 one, and voice recognition is almost impossible. if i could get it working with my live sound card, it would be nice.

[banzaikai]

It's possible that ALSA is seeing both devices. Open your mixer screen, and see what "File -> Change Device" has listed. It could be that it assigned DSP0 to the VIA sound, and DSP1 to the SBLive, and is still using that even though the VIA is disabled. So, you're adjusting the controls to the VIA when you think it's the SBLive. Worth a look, at least.

Also, under the mixer's "Capture" tab, you should see two icons below each slider - the speaker and microphone. The speaker sets whether you'll hear it piped to the speakers (monitor), and the mic selects it for recording (see attached pics). Note that only one recording input works with my VIA - other chipsets may use multiple inputs.

As for the signal levels, some cards are designed for dynamic mics, some for condenser/electret types. Some allow you to select which type by jumper or using the "Mic Boost +20dB" setting in AlsaMix. I haven't tested my VIA with a mic yet, so I have no clue as to which works best.

banzai "testing" kai

[hlrguy]

Make sure the +20 db Mic Boost is turned in KMIX.

hlrguy