How to enable capture via amixer

ubuntu microphone capture

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Capture is activated via the following command:

amixer set "Capture" cap

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Janusz

A computer science student from Bielefeld germany. Escpecially interested in overall software development, code quality improvement and a new view on programming problems. Last interesting random snippet from a blog comment: The tests are what the programmer should have done. The code is what the programmer actually did. The comments are what they thought they were doing.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Janusz almost 2 years
I want to activate a microphone on my machine via the command line. I use amixer for this.
```
amixer set "Front Mic" 66%
amixer set "Digital" 100%
amixer set "Front Mic Boost" 100%
amixer set "Capture" 100%
```
This set the volume settings. The problem is that capture is deactivated. Amixer displays this output:

Simple mixer control 'Capture',0 Capabilities: cvolume cswitch Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Capture 0 - 54 Front Left: Capture 27 [50%] [-18.00dB] [off] Front Right: Capture 27 [50%] [-18.00dB] [off]

I can active capture via kmix after that amixer shows the channels as on. But the man pages don't show how to activate the channels via amixer.
wazzaaaaa about 4 years

Brilliant. I didn't know that capture mode could be "off", although there is no visible indicator in alsamixer. In my case, a Cmedia 6206 based card, apart from setting PCM Capture Source (which can be done in alsamixer), I had to additionally "enable" the Line input (a dedicated control), using amixer -c1 set Line cap.