3

Today I decided I will install Ubuntu 16.04 alongside my Windows 10 in a dual-boot system. After installing everything, I decided to install Discord to talk with some friends, then I noticed that my mic wasn't working. I thought that there may be a problem with my Discord install, but there isn't after I checked that my mic wasn't working in many more programs (including System Settings > Sound where no sound was showing up).

I also have to mention that my sound is working completetly fine. It's just the mic that's not working. Microphone is part of my headset (CREATIVE Sound BlasterX H7).

I checked all the forums and tried many different solutions. Some of them were:

  • checking that the microphone isn't muted (it isn't);

  • checking my settings in the pavucontrol panel. Trying to split the channels and lowering each channel at a time to check if the mic will work after that;

  • looking at the Configuration panel in pavucontrol and setting it to Analog Stereo Duplex

  • looking at the alsamixer and checking that the mic isn't muted (look at the pictures below) [I may have overlooked this step]

  • trying to install a new vivid alsa dkms driver

  • restarting the audio drivers

I am 100% sure my microphone is functioning, since I can use it without any problems on Windows 10 or on any other machine.


Imporant specs [since the problem may be linked to my hardware]:

i7-6700k Skylake / z170x gaming 7 Gigabyte / 2 monitors each having its own speakers


You can find all the images here


And here you can see all the audio devices:

➜  ~ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: CA0132 Analog [CA0132 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: CA0132 Digital [CA0132 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
1
  • I don't see a possible reason so far (though you shouldn't use 153% input level, but that's unrelated). Please plug in your headset, put the output of aplayer -c0 mixer and cat /proc/asound/card0/codec\#* into a pastebin or similar and edit your question with a link.
    – dirkt
    May 27, 2017 at 6:17

1 Answer 1

1

It turns out the problem is with the CA0132 sound card and its inability to communicate with Linux machines. There is no driver for that sound card and there are a dozen more persons having this problem since ~2013. Sorry to disappoint. I answered just to make you not lose your time with this endless problem. Let's hope Creative are going to release a Linux driver for the sound card in the near future.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .