Daniel Lemire's blog

, 1 min read

If you can´t record using a microphone on the CMI8738 card under Linux…

For the 3 people in the universe who have my exact same problem, that is, they can’t record audio using a microphone on the CMI8738 card under Linux… here’s the solution:

To enable the microphone on the 0.9 series:

  1. run “alsactl store”
  2. edit /etc/asound.state. Set “Mic As Center/LFE” to “false”.
  3. run “alsactl restore” If your Mic is set to “Record” and capture
    level is appropriately high, the Mic should now work.

(My thanks to Lukasz Weber for pointing this out.)

There is also a friendly way: kmix allows you to set the “Mic As Center/LFE” property to “false” using the GUI.

Yes. I wasted 4 hours on this.

More interesting notes:

  • mhWaveEdit is the coolest sound recording software under Linux. The author should take a course in marketing though: what kind of name is that? “mhWaveEdit”!?!