Bug 40922

Please try this with PA 1.x. The path you want should be present already.

Closing due to lack of response. I'm pretty sure this has indeed been added already as per comment 1 (in a new file: analog-input-internal-mic.conf)

if problems persist, please reopen.

A further comment from Jim sent by email. Including here for public recording of my response which will follow:

Hi, sorry I was not able to try PA 1.x, as I am not willing to upgrade my whole distribution just to do that.  But do you really think analog-input-internal-mic.conf has someting to do with the problem?  My problem is with the external mic, not the internal one.  I have /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-input-internal-mic.conf
already on my system

Hi Jim,

It seems neither myself nor Arun read your initial comment properly. Sorry about that.

We had presumed you attached the patch because it worked for you but you clearly state it does not.

You should in, theory, have "ports" listed for your source that allows you to flip between internal and external mics. You can see this in pavucontrol on the "Input Devices" tab.

Please attach the outputs of "pacmd ls" and the output gained from running the alsa-info.sh script which you can download from here: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh

Thanks and sorry for prematurely closing!

Created attachment 58429 [details]
output from alsa-info.sh

output from alsa-info.sh

Created attachment 58430 [details]
output from pacmd ls

Thanks for reopening the bug.  I have attached the outputs you requested.  In pavucontrol, the only input device shown is internal audio analog stereo, no external mic.

Looking at the alsa-info.sh output I can see you're using quite an old kernel.

In order to get better support, I strongly advise you to update to something more modern. Lots of bugs have been fixed in the kernel since 2.6.35 regarding which audio controls are exposed through ALSA.

We can only work with the information ALSA supplies us and in this case, there are no separate controls listed for your external mic.

So the problem here is below PulseAudio and we cannot do much about it.

My only advice, as before, is to please try updating to a recent kernel and PulseAudio version. I'm afraid that with hardware support, this is your only option, even if you seemed unwilling before.

I advise trying e.g. a Live CD version initially (no installation) which includes a recent kernel which may at least allow you to verify that this problem has indeed been fixed.

As this is not actually a PulseAudio bug (it's in a very old version of ALSA), I'll close this again here.

Hope this is useful information none the less.