LinuxQuestions.org - How do you assign my USB MIC(ak5370) as the capture device

ls /dev/sound
adsp audio audio1 dsp dsp1 mixer mixer1 sequencer sequencer2

like I said my Linux sound knowledge is weak. My soundcard works fine. I do have a standard Mic that works but I have an HP and well parts fall or break because of use. Microphone is not broken but I don't have a connection for it anymore. I have this usb mic that works really well in Windows and would like to get it working in Linux. I know it works in linux because I've seen success stories but of course none are using Slackware or Vector so I can only go so far with their help.

Bottom-line is that from what information I have gathered on the internet that my usb mic won't work unless the capture device is change from the soundcard to the usb mic. Linux will continue to use the Mic connection on the soundcard until someone tells it to use the usb mic. Unfortunately I have yet found a Linux distro that provides and easy GUI solution to this. I not sure where, how, or what config file I am supposed to edit to tell Linux to use the USB Mic instead of the Mic port on the soundcard. One suggestion was that I need to change alsa to use hw:1 0 inorder to make the soundcard stop being used as a capture device and the usb mic enable. However, I don't know what " hw:1 0 " means and I assume the numbers are refering to dsp and dsp1. I will post the article and maybe somebody can Vectorize the help since this was done on a gentoo system. Here is the article:

Logitech USB Desktop Microphone under Linux
Filed under: Linux — Daniel Lemire @ 21:09

I got my new Logitech USB Desktop Microphone working under Linux. Should have been very easy, but I hit a small nail.

Plug the device in and type “lsusb”, you should see:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0556:0001 Asahi Kasei Microsystems Co., Ltd AK5370 I/F A/D Converter

Ah! The device is called AK5370.

Do “dmesg”‘ you should see two lines like those:

usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 4

usbcore: registered new driver snd-usb-audio

If you don’t see the second line, you have a problem. In my case, I didn’t have the usbaudio driver so I only got the first line. I had to go compile usbaudio. To do so, I did “uname -a”, it gave me “Linux romeo 2.6.10-gentoo-r6″. I went under /usr/srclinux-2.6.10-gentoo-r6 and typed

genkernel --no-clean --menuconfig all

Next, after the menu opened up, I went under driver/audio and chose usb audio drivers (and loadable modules). Exiting genkernel launched the compilation of the module and all I had to do was to unplug/replug my microphone. You should check that /dev/dsp1 appears.

All I had to do after this was to launch mhwaveedit and choose “hw:1,0″ as my recording device, so that I would not record out of my sound card, but rather from my microphone. Setting the sampling rate to 44100 Hz seemed to be necessary.

To enable the microphone under KDE, you have to launch kmix and choose the appropriate device, if you don’t see the device, quit kmix (through the file menu) and restart it. This being said, I don’t see why you need the microphone under KDE. However, make sure you turn the gain all the way to the maximum for optimal sound quality.

As you can see I have a dsp1: First snag in this help is that ls usb didn't work but here is my dmesg output: (I'm not going paste everything just the usb stuff)

ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 1.1 (#2)
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: irq 11, io mem 0xfebfc000
hub 3-0:1.0: USB hub found
hub 3-0:1.0: 3 ports detected
USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v2.3
sl811: driver sl811-hcd, 19 May 2005
usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
usb 2-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3
usbcore: registered new driver hiddev
usb 3-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3
usbcore: registered new driver usbhid
drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.01:USB HID core driver

usbcore: registered new driver usblp
drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: v0.13: USB Printer Device Class driver
usbcore: registered new driver snd-usb-audio
usbcore: registered new driver audio
drivers/usb/class/audio.c: v1.0.0:USB Audio Class driver

As you can see here there are no problems in hardware detection here and I do have the usb audio driver so in theory my usb mic should work if configured properly. The part that's fuzzy in this help is this part:

All I had to do after this was to launch mhwaveedit and choose “hw:1,0″ as my recording device, so that I would not record out of my sound card, but rather from my microphone. Setting the sampling rate to 44100 Hz seemed to be necessary.

Now I don't have this mhwaveedit software that all my sound is pumping through and this would not work for other programs that use their own sound recording software but don't give the option to use a different recording device. What I need is help configuring ALSA so that ALSA disables the soundcard as the capture device and enables usb mic as the capture device. This way, all programs that use a mic will use my usb mic instead of my soundcard mic.