Ubuntu Sound

Installing Karmic Koala on my computer. Sound and video break are again broken. Time to record what I do to work around problems.

For sound, see the instructions posted by VertexPusher at the bottom of page2 of an Ubuntu Forums thread.

I removed pulseaudio and logged out and in.

I reinstalled pulseaudio and logged out and in.

I right-clicked on the speaker icon at the top-left of the gnome panel, selected the 'input tab', and set my microphone to microphone 2. (I used the Applications>Sound>Recorder [check spelling] application to test which setting would record sound.) I played around with the microphone amplification and output levels using the recorder to find a good gain with low hiss. (I set amplification to about 2x unamplified, and I set output level to about 80% of the dotted line.)

I started skype and set the sound options to reference pulse. Clicked on Apply. Used 'generate test sound' to verify basic settings. I disabled "allow skype to set my mixer levels. Used 'generate test call' to prove all settings.

I quit skype, logged out, logged into my wife's account and set up skype again.


Argh! After the above when my wife went to use Skype, it *still* didn't work.

I upgraded to Skype 2.1.

I opened up Applications > Sound > something PulseAudio. (I was using my wife's account which displays Thai labels on the menus, so I'm not sure of the name of the app or what I was doing with it.) Here I found some other microphone thingy and clicked on it some.