Command to mute and unmute a microphone

Question

During voice / video conversations I would like to mute/unmute the microphone without having to go through all these steps each time:

• Sound indicator, Sound preferences, Select Input, Mute or unmute the microphone.

I'm looking for either:

• an application that can do this from the command line,
• a way I can assign a keyboard shortcut that can mute/unmute the microphone

Solution 1

Go to System Preferences then Keyboard and click Shortcuts then Custom Shortcuts:

Click on Add

Fill in:

Toggle Microphone

and

amixer set Capture toggle

For USB webcams you need to chose the device (-c 1), or maybe another number.

amixer -c 1 sset Mic toggle

Click Apply and then associate a new key with this command (e.g. the Pause/Break key).

Solution 2

You can mute the microphone with

amixer set Capture nocap

and unmute the microphone with

amixer set Capture cap

Solution 3

I switch between a USB webcam/mic and my internal mic and the other solutions typically work on the "default" device which is often not the device I'm actively using so I wrote this to mute all microphones

pacmd list-sources | \
        grep -oP 'index: \d+' | \
        awk '{ print $2 }' | \
        xargs -I{} pactl set-source-mute {} toggle

Solution 4

amixer set Capture toggle && amixer get Capture | grep '\[off\]' && notify-send "MIC switched OFF" || notify-send "MIC switched ON"

Solution 5

Simply mute/unmute with this command:

amixer -D pulse sset Capture toggle

You can also add notification to make sure it's on or off, as per vladimirich answer to the same question

amixer -D pulse sset Capture toggle && amixer get Capture | grep '\[off\]' && notify-send "MIC switched OFF" || notify-send "MIC switched ON"

Inspired by Mark Rooney's answer on muting/unmuting sound.

View more solutions

Comments

[JanC]

If you use Empathy for voice chat, it has a mute button built-in (that works with Google Talk at least, Skype isn't supported yet).

[Lucian Adrian Grijincu]

I'm looking for something that can be made to run through a shortcut, similar to the main volume mute/unmute laptop toggle button.

[Lucian Adrian Grijincu]

These mute the sound from my speakers, not the microphone, but thanks.

[João Pinto]

You just need to replace 'Master' with the appropriate mixer name, on the terminal use "amixer" to get a list of mixer devices.

[Lucian Adrian Grijincu]

This seems to work: # amixer set Capture toggle

[Lucian Adrian Grijincu]

Can you edit your response (I don't have the necessary karma) to include this answer so I'll accept it?

[Diego V]

Works this with recent releases? Thank you.

[Pierre-Antoine]

It does work; thanks to Lucian. I have an "Audio mute" key on my laptop, I mapped it to shift+Audio mute, which is very easy to remember :)

[Jason Kleban]

The command amixer set Mic toggle (not Capture) works for me in terminal but any assigned keyboard shortcut doesn't actually seem to run. I've tried ctrl+Audio Mute but also ctrl+M (captured by keyboard key presses)

[WhiskerBiscuit]

that worked great with raspberry pi, except you substitute Mic for Capture

[Vitaly]

pacmd is only interactive if you don't give it any commands. I used pacmd list-sources to get a list of inputs and outputs. Under index 2 I had an input devide. (based on its name) Then you can run pacmd set-source-mute 2 1 to mute. Last parameter is a boolean for mute state. 0 or false for unmute and 1 or true for mute.

[Marceau]

Confirmed, this works with Ubuntu 16.10 as well.

[Stephen Angelico]

On MATE the menus for adding the keybinding are a little different, but it works in the same way. Thanks!

[Musa Al-hassy]

I like the way in which you combine grep and notifications: Super Neat =)

[gronostaj]

This actually works for me on Ubuntu 16.04. -q can be skipped.

[Kristof Tak]

bindsym XF86AudioMicMute exec --no-startup-id amixer -D pulse sset Capture toggle for i3wm

[Patrick Dark]

This command works for me in Pop_OS! 19.10 (which is based on Ubuntu 19.10). One can explicitly disable microphone capture with the command amixer --device pulse sset Capture nocap and turn the volume of capturing to 0% simultaneously with the command amixer --device pulse sset Capture nocap 0%.

[brettinternet]

I like this atomic approach. Consider using something like 'index: \d?\d' to account for double-digit source indices.

[blockloop]

'index: \d+' is the more appropriate regexp, but yeah that works :)

[Pieter Bos]

Here is a one-liner to toggle, instead of set the state: pacmd list-sources | grep -e 'index' -e 'muted:' | sed -n -e '/index: 5/,$p' | head -n2 | tail -n1 | grep yes && pacmd set-source-mute 5 0 || pacmd set-source-mute 5 1. Note that the index occurs in three places, so you need to change those.