[Solved] Headset's microphone won't work

GordonGR · Last edited by GordonGR on Wed Jan 12, 2022 5:09 pm; edited 1 time in total

Greetings.

I'm rather new to Gentoo, having switched from Arch on September. I've got a lot of help from the Discord server, but to this they seem unable to help as well.

I bought a rather simple headset (two jack cables, one green, one pink). I connected the green cable to the rear green slot and the pink to the pink. (Normally I have my speakers on the green.) The headphones work as expected. The microphone does not. By that I mean that, although I can hear my voice through the headphones (if I raise the rear microphone's volume and boost volume enough in alsamixer), the microphone will not capture any sound (tried with arecord as per the wiki), the pavucontrol bars won't flicker, pavucontrol itself doesn't see it (it's not listed as headset microphone or anything, it only sees rear mic and front mic, none works) and no applications (zoom, discord, viber etc) will see it or capture sound.

I'm using sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin. I use a KDE plasma profile with OpenRC. I also have the alsa and pulseaudio USE flags in my make.conf. I've read the Gentoo and Arch Linux wiki articles on Alsa and PulseAudio. I tried following this troubleshooting guide, but didn't manage anything. I also tried adding

GordonGR · Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2022 5:08 pm Post subject:

I solved it!! For the record, what I did was this:

I opened alsamixer, pressed F6 to select my card (1, HDA Intel), F3 for playback, then found Loopback (it was disabled) and pressed arrow-up to enable it. Then the same for Dynamic Power-Control (I don't even know what it is). Then I went back to F4 Capture, made sure my Capture was all the way up to 100 and it wrote "CAPTURE" under it, and made sure I had pressed space bar in "Rear Mic". I went to pavucontrol and noticed that in Input Devices my Rear Microphone was muted, so I unmuted it, and voilà, its bar flickered when I talked.