PulseAudio doesn't use Webcam microphone

[wvxvw]

Hello,
Sorry, I know PulseAudio is a pain in the rear place... but I would be happy to hear any suggestion to try to make it work with my webcam microphone. I'm working from remote and the customre is the kind you can't teach to use anything, so I have to use Skype.

The fault is certainly on the PusleAudio side as no program (except, perhaps by chance, Google hangout) can gain access to the camera microphone.
Some info (which is really a nonsense, but I don't know why it is like that):

arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889 Digital [ALC889 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 2: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]
  Subdevices: 2/2
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
card 2: Q9000 [QuickCam Pro 9000], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

In actuallity, there is the on-board sound card, Intell I believe, the microphone from my headset (non functioning) and the microphone in the webcam - I don't know what it prints here and why :/

[Gareth Jones]

If you're using GNOME, which device is selected in the "Input" tab of Sound Settings? (If you're using another desktop, try the "Input Devices" tab in pavucontrol.)

[wvxvw]

Thanks for reply.
I'm using KDE, and in the pavucontrol my webcam was selected, I could even see the activity bar changing when I spoke to the microphone, but still no sound.

What I did in the end: turned autospawning of the pulseaudio server off, log out / log in (simple turning off pulseaudio didn't work, besides, it tainted the kernel for some reason), then reconfigured skype to use ALSA, very similar to the steps in here: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1...kype-for-linux and it finally worked.

I don't know what I' missing if I don't use pulseaudio at all, but so far it doesn't seem like I would have any disadvantage doing that...

EDIT: ok, this change made all sound in the HTML video (not Flash) disappear...

[Gareth Jones]

Do you actually need to disable Pulse just to tell Skype to use ALSA directly?

Skype's Pulse support is notorious, but Pulse itself is fairly mature these days, and a lot of other sound-related stuff depends on it to work smoothly now. (Pulse did have a rocky start, partly due to distros adopting it by default before its developers felt it was ready, but it should be pretty solid these days.)

[wvxvw]

I'm not sure. One thing that doesn't work still (but it didn't work before either) is the recordmydesctop - it's a screencapture program, it should be able to record my microphone, but it fails to do it, and it only tries to do it through PulseAudio. But it didn't work with PulseAudio running too.
Somehow I could get Google hangout to work with PulseAudio, but I'm not sure it even relies on it to get sound, it looks like it is rather using something more low-level.

From my earlier experience, PulseAudio never worked well with Wine. I.e. it would either be the application in Wine that can play sounds or outside, but not both (using any kind of a messenger while playing a game was not possible).

Re' particularly Skype - *maybe* there are some configuration settings somewhere that would let me force it to use ALSA while Pulse is still running, but there's not such option in the GUI. I.e. if there's the process with PulseAudio, then Skype will not display the UI needed to use ALSA.