I have been having problems trying to use a computer microphone to
record audio to the hard drive. I am using Slack 9.1 and ALSA with a
Ensoniq ES1370 PCI sound card.

Playing audio files works fine. I can record, sort of, using both the
"rec" app from the sox suite, and "arecord". What I end up with is an
audio file that contains a lot of static, with a very muffled and
distorted capture of the audio that I was trying to record. This is
with the Mic capture control on in alsamixer. I've tried all the
settings I can think of in alsamixer with no joy, but maybe there is a
magic setting that will work with this sound card?

I've tried the mic on other boxes running both windows 2K, slack 9.1,
and Mandrake 9.1. The mic works fine under Win2K, but I couldn't get it
to record on the other Linux boxes, all using ALSA.

Any ideas to fix the problem?

Below is the relevant output from lsmod:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
snd-pcm-oss 37252 0
snd-mixer-oss 11992 0 [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-ens1370 8172 0
gameport 1452 0 [snd-ens1370]
snd-pcm 55904 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-ens1370]
snd-timer 13252 0 [snd-pcm]
snd-page-alloc 6004 0 [snd-ens1370 snd-pcm]
snd-rawmidi 12512 0 [snd-ens1370]
snd-seq-device 3920 0 [snd-rawmidi]
snd-ak4531-codec 4792 0 [snd-ens1370]
snd 27460 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-ens1370 snd-pcm snd-timer snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device snd-ak4531-codec]
soundcore 3332 6 [snd]
agpgart 39576 0 (unused)


Thanks,
--
Larry Stamm
http://www.larrystamm.com

Larry Stamm wrote:

> I have been having problems trying to use a computer microphone to
> record audio to the hard drive. I am using Slack 9.1 and ALSA with a
> Ensoniq ES1370 PCI sound card.
>
> Playing audio files works fine. I can record, sort of, using both the
> "rec" app from the sox suite, and "arecord". What I end up with is an
> audio file that contains a lot of static, with a very muffled and
> distorted capture of the audio that I was trying to record. This is
> with the Mic capture control on in alsamixer. I've tried all the
> settings I can think of in alsamixer with no joy, but maybe there is a
> magic setting that will work with this sound card?
>
> I've tried the mic on other boxes running both windows 2K, slack 9.1,
> and Mandrake 9.1. The mic works fine under Win2K, but I couldn't get it
> to record on the other Linux boxes, all using ALSA.
>
> Any ideas to fix the problem?
>
Just an idea, check you haven't got mic boost enabled, as with a cheap mic
it tends to boost the static much more than the actual voice.