Fedora sound recording problems… solved

Today I realized that my system’s ability to record sounds was gone… I had set it to record a TV show a couple of days ago, and when I sat back to watch it this morning, I was surprized by the fact that the clip had no sound! Actually, the sound stream was just silence!

My sound hardware consists of an SB Live 5.1. I fired up audacity, started to record from the microphone and at the same time I loaded alsamixer and started playing around with the capture settings. Suddenly, after raising the AC97 slider up I noticed that audacity started recording sounds and not just silence! The AC97 slider was the last thing I would blame for my sound recording problems, but it proved to be the cause of all issues. If its level was set to zero, then no sound was recorded, only silence. If you raise the Capture slider together with the AC97 one, then you get a higher recording level.

The question that still remains unanswered is what brought the AC97 slider down causing my sound input devices to record only silence? Dunno… btw, it was not me. I believe this had happened when I upgraded to kernel 2.6.13. I remember that my volume levels were messed up after booting with the new kernel. But, I’m not sure.

Hmm, I’d better remember all this…

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