Problems recording sound in FreeBSD 5.1

[Scott Lambert]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 01:36:52AM -0400, Stuart Barkley wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2003 at 22:52 +0200, Joachim Strömbergson wrote:
> 
> > Hardware wise, I've got an Asus A7V8X motherboard with built in AC97
> > sound. I'm running FreeBSD 5.1 and KDE3.
> >
> > Is there ar simple way to directly verify that the mic input works?
> > Has anybody experienced similar problems? Anybody knows what might
> > be the problem?

I'm going to jump in and say "Me too!"
 
> You should be able to bring up the microphone volume in the mixer and
> hear it in your speakers or headphones:
> 
>     % mixer mic 100
>     Setting the mixer mic to 100:100.
>     %

I have done this.
 
> For recording from the microphone, I normally select the recording
> source with mixer and set the record level with the rec device:
> 
>     % mixer =rec mic mic 100
>     Setting the mixer mic to 100:100.
>     Recording source: mic
>     %

I have done this.
 
> As a test you can copy from /dev/audio to a file and vice-versa for
> playback:
> 
>     % cp /dev/audio test.au
>     ^C [after several seconds of recording]
>     % cp test.au /dev/audio
>     %
 
I haven't done this but I have tried the recording app in Gnome.

It didn't work.

> Are you sure you are going into a microphone input and not a line-in
> input?  If you have a line-in input, are you able to record from that
> input when feeding it a signal from a cd player or something similar?

I'm positive in my case.
 
> Are you sure you are going into an input and not an output?  I've seen
> some newer motherboards replace the line-in and microphone in jacks
> with output jacks for 5.1 sound systems.

Positive, I have two jacks, headphone and mic.
 
> Two other things come to mind for AC97 recording:
> 
> - AC97 specifies a control register bit which enables a 20dB
> microphone input gain.  For the microphones I use, I seem to always
> need the boost.  I apply the following patch (to 4.7, I'm not sure if
> it applies to 5.1 at all).
> 

Now this is interesting, I will have to try something like this but I'm using
a Yamaha.

13:35:15 Tue Jul 15 $ cat /dev/sndstat 
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <Yamaha DS-1E (YMF754)> at memory 0xefdf0000 irq 11 (4p/2r/0v channels duplex default)

13:35:26 Tue Jul 15 $ mixer
Mixer vol      is currently set to 100:100
Mixer pcm      is currently set to  99:99
Mixer line     is currently set to  73:73
Mixer mic      is currently set to 100:100
Mixer cd       is currently set to  75:75
Mixer rec      is currently set to 100:100
Recording source: mic

I am trying an Andrea AN-50 headset.  It came in a box of Wheaties
labeled OS/2 Warp 4.  It is the only mic I have.

-- 
Scott Lambert                    KC5MLE                       Unix SysAdmin
lambert at lambertfam.org