Timothy Murphy wrote:
I'm running F-7 with KDE,
and I'm trying to get Skype working.
My voice is not recorded on the Test call ...
I guess I should start by testing the built-in microphone.
But how?
The sound system seems designed for sound engineers,
not ordinary mortals.
What on earth do all these symbols in KMix mean?
(I've left clicked on the loudspeaker icon in my panel,
and clicked on Mixer.)
Whoever designed the sound GUI seemed to have a love affair with triangles.
What on earth do these half-filled in triangles mean?
And why do they have a smaller triangle beside them pointing to the right?
Why am I given no hint of their meaning when I hover over them?
And why does input have what looks like headphones as icon?
When I try the CLI command "alsamixer" instead
I get 19 (yes, 19) controls,
none of them properly labelled.
I see one called Mic, set to 0.
It isn't at all obvious how to change this, or any, setting,
but I go to the Mic icon with the right arrow key,
and then use the up arrow to go from 0 to 81.
Was that a good idea?
I cannot tell, as I have no idea how to test the result.
Is there a simple introduction to Fedora sound somewhere?
When I get a new mobile phone, I take it out of the box,
put in a SIM card and it works.
There aren't 19 switches to adjust.
I bought a DVD player yesterday.
I connect it to my TV with a Scart connector,
switch on and put in a DVD.
I am asked one question - do I want to play the DVD?
I answer Yes, and it plays.
Hi Tim,
I guess you probably got sorted with your audio difficulties, however, I
am keen to find out whether your experience is related to a certain kind
of audio hardware. What is yours ? Can you post the result of:
/sbin/lspci|grep audio
Then using the pci numeric ID {first digits eg: "00:06.0"} give output of:
/sbin/lspci -n|grep 00:06.0
Then the pci info for that pci-id {eg: 10de:006a}:
/sbin/lspcu -vd 10de:006a
With reference to your musings on "ease of use", it is perhaps because
the Graphical User Interface tool developers have tried to over-simplify
the UI that it has become difficult to make the UI control the hardware
as expected.
My understanding of these tools is that they enumerate the capabilities
of the audio hardware, and show controls for the "bits" they find. It is
unclear whether the mixer application is missing reading bits it should
have {ie mixer bug}, or whether the sound driver {alsa} is not providing
the correct information for the mixer application {possible driver bug
for the audio hardware you use}.
DaveT.
