FBSD 10.2, KDE 4.14.3, no microphone

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 17 Jan 2016 18:18:56 -0600, fbsd wrote:
> Hi  -
> 
> On FBSD 10.2, with KDE 4.14.3, I enter system settings > Hardware > 
> Multimedia > Audio and Video settings.
> 
> Under Audio Playback I find one device "oss" and audio playback works 
> just fine.
> Under Audio Recording - I see a blank screen. No devices listed. And, 
> obviously, microphones don't work at all.
> 
>  From pciconv -lv:
> 
> hdac0 at pci0:0:27:0:      class=0x040300 card=0x04f51028 chip=0x1c208086 
> rev=0x04 hdr=0x00
>      vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
>      device     = '6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition 
> Audio Controller'
>      class      = multimedia
>      subclass   = HDA
> 
>  From /boot/loader.conf:
> 
> snd_hda_load="YES"
> 
> 
> Clearly I'm missing something, but I've no idea what.
> Can someone point me in the right direction?

Check the "low level" functionality of the microphone, for
example like this:

	% mixer
	Mixer vol      is currently set to  85:85
	Mixer pcm      is currently set to  45:45
	Mixer line     is currently set to 100:100
	Mixer mic      is currently set to   0:0	<--- this
	Mixer cd       is currently set to   0:0
	Mixer rec      is currently set to 100:100
	Mixer igain    is currently set to  97:97
	Mixer monitor  is currently set to   0:0
	Recording source: line				<--- and this

If you system supports more than one mixer (check "ls /dev/mixer*"),
you can use -f to specify which mixer should be listed. See "man
mixer" for details. Play with the levels and check if the microphone
is working. Note that it's possible that there are two or three
different mixers which support the microphone input.

In X, there are several mixer programs that can be used, even
inside KDE. I think the "aumix" port provides such a mixer that
you can use as an alternative to the KDE build-in mixer.

On KDE, you'll usually find the "abstraction dependency library
layer cake of platform interfaces", so there are many layers
involved (OSS, maybe ALSA, Phonon, who knows). Many "moving parts"
where things can go wrong... :-(



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...