Polycom Communicator Low Mic Volume

Posted on June 17, 2008 - by jono

Polycom Communicator Low Mic Volume

Dear Lazyweb,

UPDATE – READ BELOW THE SOLUTION

I am having troubles getting my Polycom Communicator for Skype speakerphone working in Ubuntu – the microphone volume is always very low in Skype, and when I try to adjust the mixer volume slider for the mic, there is no luck. This does not appear to be a Skype issue – I tried recording in Audacity and the problem exists there too.

Has anyone found a fix for this, and does this exist on other distros?

UPDATE: Solution

Much thanks to Tom Mann who left a comment to point to his forums post with a possible solution. Well, I did the following, and it worked:

sudo alsactl store
sudo cp /var/lib/alsa/asound.state /var/lib/alsa/asound.state.old
sudo nano /var/lib/alsa/asound.state

I then found the state.Communicator block and the sub-block with name 'Mic Capture Volume' – the value was set to 0, so I set it to the maximum value, which is 64. My block looks like this:

control.2 {

            comment.access 'read write'

            comment.type INTEGER

            comment.count 1

            comment.range '0 - 64'

            iface MIXER

            name 'Mic Capture Volume'

            value 64

    }

Then unplug the Polycom Communicator and plug it back in again. It should now work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Comments

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June 17, 2008

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blindvic said:

I don’t know about Ubuntu, but WinXP in such cases i enable mic boost
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June 17, 2008

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Aidan Delaney said:

Jono, there’s an input and output slider for the Mic. Are you sure you’re toggling the input slider and not the output (speaker volume) slider?

Or use Ekiga, it plays nicely with pulseaudio etc…
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June 17, 2008

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Mike Gratton said:

If you’re using Pulse Audio and have the “Let Skype automatically adjust the volume level” option check, Skype helpfully keeps the microphone level zeroed. Untick that option and readjust the levels manually.

/Mike
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June 17, 2008

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Zach said:

I have found what mike says to be true on every version of Linux I use, the mic adjust feature in Skype is worthless.
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June 17, 2008

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Tom Mann said:

The EeePC has the same problem with it’s Microphone – I have found the fix for that works quite well for me – I have posted the fix for the EeePC, as something to try, to the Ubuntu Forums.
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January 18, 2009

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Quad said:

wonderful post))
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April 17, 2009

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adithya said:

thanks for the post, my mic seems to be better now.. although there;s a little bit of lag
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