Fatdog64-620 Final (17 April 2013) and 621 (9 May 2013)

[Ibidem]

I restarted with a clean no-savefile boot. Set up again and made a new savefile. There are no .asoundrc files. The "Problem with sound capture " message no longer appears but problems remain, the mic is not usable. It is working in both Skype and mhWaveEdit, but the gain is tiny, mhWaveEdit shows almost a flat line when recording.

Speaker volume is a bit low too but is bearable, mic is not.

The soundcard is a HDA Intel Chip: Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa)

The mic works fine when running win 7 ultimate (64bit), on this lenovo T400 laptop, about the only thing in Windows that does!

Here are my alsamixer settings:

Ty turning down the right side capture (press "c").
Odd, but for some hardware it's needed.

[Snail]

My mic/sound working at all but so poorly reminds me of a driver issue I had using Win 7 ultimate on this same laptop. The mic lost gain all of a suddden. It was not nearly as bad as it is with Fatdog, it was still usable but I had to speak very loudly to use Skype. Googling revealed that the problem was a driver update pushed by Lenovo and a roll back to the previous driver was a total fix. Since this proves that there is at least one very bad "official" driver out there, presumably written by Conexant, maybe the Linux driver is also a dud? Is there another driver i could try?

[Snail]

Hi Ibidem,

Thanks for your reply. Can you clarify? I do not understand your instruction.

[chapchap70]

I restarted with a clean no-savefile boot. Set up again and made a new savefile. There are no .asoundrc files. The "Problem with sound capture " message no longer appears but problems remain, the mic is not usable. It is working in both Skype and mhWaveEdit, but the gain is tiny, mhWaveEdit shows almost a flat line when recording.

Speaker volume is a bit low too but is bearable, mic is not.

The soundcard is a HDA Intel Chip: Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa)

The mic works fine when running win 7 ultimate (64bit), on this lenovo T400 laptop, about the only thing in Windows that does!

Here are my alsamixer settings:

I have had problems getting Skype to work in Linux in the past while other video applications were working. How does your mic work with VLC?

VLC recognized and was able to record with an old camera but Skype did not record/capture using video1 like VLC did.

[Snail]

Hi chapchap70,

Skype seems to be working fine. The camera is also fine. Note, I'm using the camera and mic that are built-in to this laptop, not a separate camera. The sound problem isn't confined to Skype, mhWaveEdit has the exact same problem. So either there is a mic driver problem or I'm doing something wrong . I'm hoping the latter but have no idea at the moment.

I'm not familiar with VLC. The Fatdog version doesn't appear to offer sound recording. There is no sign of a record button.

[smokey01]

I'm not familiar with VLC. The Fatdog version doesn't appear to offer sound recording. There is no sign of a record button.

Under the View Menu item, tick advanced controls. Now you can record anything you can watch.

[chapchap70]

After opening VLC, click on "Media" then "Open Capture Device". If you click "Play" on the bottom of the window, you should be able to see yourself via your built in camera and any noise you make should play through the computer speakers if your mic is working.

The dropdown menu by the "Play" button should have a "Convert" choice. That will enable to save a recording as a file.


I don't have to enter anything into my "Device Selection" fields but the defaults on mine are:

Video : dev/video0 (I believe dev/video is a symlink to dev/video0)
Audio is hw:0,0



Edit: If you have access to a USB webcam, VLC should see this as dev/video1 and hw:0,1

I would think that if the USB webcam plays in Skype with sound, than that would confirm that it is a driver issue with your built in mic.

[Sage]

Surprising to see so many folks still using Skype since it was acquired by M$, especially as so much work and advice has been given previously on (P)SIP. Maybe one can't stop GCHQ and the CIA from intercepting video footage of one's beautiful countenance (and use it match with CCTV coverage?!), but I'd prefer that it didn't get added to the Hanford server farm repository...

[DC]

Hi everbody,

Could somebody remind me how to set the numlock to on at boot up

thanks

DC

[Snail]

Thanks to you all for the help so far. VLC records and plays video just fine, although not great for rapid movement on my system. Plays both video at full speed and sound from .wmv file and sound from .mp3 files. Sound is not recorded, or at least not at audible levels.

So still no success with the mic. Seems pretty certain now that it's a driver issue.

Help! I really don't want to have to use Windows on this system any more, Quite apart from the distasteful ethics of MS, the OS is just crawling now. Setting up Fatdog wasn't all plain sailing but it was a breeze compared with trying and failing to delouse win 7 and keeping it deloused will be an ongoing battle even if I succeed this time. All except this mic issue that is.

[Snail]

There is a Numlockx pet in the package manager.

[DC]

Hi Snail,

I know about the pet,
But I've a memory of fatdog asking do you want numlock in the start configuration. Implying the function is built in. I can't find any reference to it. In other words how do you rerun the start configuration?

thanks

DC

[Snail]

It works! I feel really dumb. I didn't realise that for sound capture, the initial alsamixer screen is useless. I just discovered that hitting "F4" you get an entirely new screen that had most of the mic sliders at zero. I just set them all to 100% and now it works.

In my defense, the alsamixer interface is just horrid. What for instance is the function of the mic slider on the playback screen for heavens' sake? And hitting the speaker icon on the taskbar opens alsamixer not maximised, which hides the two RHS sliders, and there is no slider at the bottom to indicate that there is anything more to see. I've wasted hours on this crap and it was completely unnecessary.

[Snail]

Hi DC,

Sorry, I can't find it myself.

Why can't every pup developer just implement upgrades to the Lucid 528 user interface? Playdayz and 01micko did great on that one, nothing else I've seen since is quite as good, as far a user help and interface friendliness goes. Not knocking Fatdog, it's still wonderful, especially the speed, but I'm spending a lot of time learning my way around the differences. A bit more help with the initial installation would make it a lot more accessible for win refugees too.

[smokey01]

Snail there is quite a lot of help built in that explains most things.

In my repository there is a help file called "how to do stuff in Fatdog" that should be of assistance.

Retrovol is also in my repository, which I find better than Alsamixer.

In the Fatdog package manager select smokey01.com

Cheers

[Sylvander]

In my repository there is a help file called "how to do stuff in Fatdog"...
In the Fatdog package manager select smokey01.com

How would I get to your repository, to get to the help file?
Chose smokey01.com in the Fatdog package manager, but that seemed to be of no help.

[CatDude]

Hi

How would I get to your repository, to get to the help file?
Chose smokey01.com in the Fatdog package manager, but that seemed to be of no help.

Here you go mate: http://www.smokey01.com/software/Fatdog64-600/other/Howto-do-stuff-in-FatDog.pdf
It appears as though the package manager does not look inside of sub-directories.

CatDude
.

[Hans]

On the verge of nagging:

It can't handle wallpaper names with spaces. Rename a wallpaper in /usr/share/backgrounds so it has a space in the name, select, apply.
Then again start the wallpaper setter in the control panel and nothing happens. Remove the space from the name and do ctrl alt backspace and you get an error that the wallpaper is not there, well, that is to be expected. But the wallpaper setter is working again.

The script breaks of at the end at GTK-DIALOG when it stumbles on the space.
I think it is good practise to avoid spaces in names in general but other people might get confused, so on the verge of nagging I decided to post this bug, sorry

cheers to all

[Sylvander]

Here you go mate: [url=http://www.smokey01.com/software/Fatdog ... FatDog.pdf]

Oops...
Went to save that pdf in my /mnt/home directory, and found I already had it saved there; must have been some time earlier.
Now to read it [yet again?]

[Ibidem]

Hi Ibidem,

Thanks for your reply. Can you clarify? I do not understand your instruction.

I see you figured out the problem, but for anyone else...
In alsamixer, you have at least 3 screens: output, input, and all. You need the screen for input or all.
Each slider has 2 sides, so it can control stereo sound.
Tab to change screens/right or left arrow to change selected slider till you get to the "Capture" slider.
Up/down arrow to change volume; 0-9 are shortcuts to set both sides to 00%,10%,...90%.
After that, if you don't get sound in, try setting one side (in my case, the right) to 0% or as close as you can get; this requires pressing Z or C to reduce the volume of the left or right side.

Code: Select all

Left  Both  Right <- Side to change
 Q      W      E  <- Increase volume
 Z      X      C  <- Reduce volume

If you need to know more, press "h" to see the keys to use.