This is a quick one. I installed MX Linux 21.3 on an old iMac 8,1 for use as a general purpose living room PC. It’s mainly used for streaming videos and music. However, sometimes it would be nice to use it for Skype. It’s got a built-in webcam which worked out of the box, but for some reason the microphone was not detected.

Strangely, I could record audio using arecord as root (sudo su), but not as a regular user. (sudo arecord didn’t work either.) Although the audio recorded as root was very crackly.

After chasing a bunch of dead-ends, I found the answer on the Arch Linux wiki: Microphone not detected by PulseAudio (This is becoming a bit of a theme for this blog.)

The solution was exactly as described in the link above, but I’ll record it here for posterity (copied from the Arch wiki, loosely edited):

Determine the card and device number of your mic:

$ arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 2: ALC889A Alt Analog [ALC889A Alt Analog]
Subdevices: 2/2
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1

Choose a device and specify it in hw:CARD,DEVICE notation. In this case, the first device is represented as hw:0,0.

Edit /etc/pulse/default.pa and insert a load-module line specifying your device as follows:

load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0,0
# This line should be somewhere before the line
.ifexists module-udev-detect.so

Restart pulseaudio to apply the new settings:

pulseaudio -k && pulseaudio -D

After this, the microphone appeared in PulseAudio Volume Control. I also selected the ‘Set as fallback’ option in PulseAudio Volumne Control.

After this, arecord worked without root, and Skype could find the microphone! And the recorded audio was crystal clear, which was an improvement over the crackly audio when recording as root.