laptop's built-in mic not working anymore [solved]

[pepperminty]

Using Mint Cinnamon 18.3.


My ThinkPad T430 comes with an all-in-one audio jack. It can accept a stereo earphone jack (2 rings on metal tip), or it can also work with a combo mic-and-ear audio jack (3 rings on metal tip). I use my earphones for the most. I use the mic-and-ear combo unit only once in a while.

Can anyone tell me why my laptop's built-in mic no longer works?

Someone suspected that maybe the switch was left open when I pulgged in the mic-and-ear jack. But I don't think so. In the sound app>Input_tab, the device goes from "Microphone, Built-in Audio" (mic-and-ear audio jack, or earphone jack) to "Internal Microphone, Built-in Audio". It doesn't appear to be a mechanical issue.

Please help me diagnose the problem.

Thanks.

[pepperminty]

bump

[sebastjava]

Open alsamixer in your Terminal and test different input levels. On my machine, there was just noise from this microphone, at first. I had to put Mic Boost at zero to fix this issue. Next, you could read this: Asus Eee Pc X101ch and Intel Atom: Fix The Speaker And Microphone!
What do you get from this microphone? Total silence or 100% noise?

[pepperminty]

Sebastian,

I tried playing with the input levels of all 5 capture devices.

Screenshot from 2018-05-01 19-32-00.png

It still didn't work.

[sebastjava]

So there is no signal at all? No noise? Just nothing?
Then, i don't know but, maybe, you should change something in this file: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
If you are patient and have plenty of time, you could take a look at these:

https://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/audio_intel_hda (in french...)
https://www.alsa-project.org/main/index ... _Intel_HDA
http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-ker ... xt;hb=HEAD

This /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file is responsible for setting the HDA jacks. Here, it resurrected my speaker so i suppose that maybe it could switch on your microphone.

I think it will help to remember this info taken from your screen capture:
Your Card: HDA Intel PCH
Your Chip: Realtek ALC3202
This "sounds" interesting...

You could start by just trying to put options snd-hda-intel model=thinkpad at the end of this file: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf Then restart your machine and try this microphone.

You could also try to install Alsa-tools-gui from your software manager and experiment with hdajackretask.

I am not sure any of these will work but you could give it a try.

Be patient. Be careful. Have fun.

[pepperminty]

folks, i tested it again and now it works just fine! thank you everyone. I don't know what fixed things.

[sebastjava]

When you are sure everything is OK, please add [SOLVED] to your title... like this:

[SOLVED] laptop's built-in mic not working anymore