Hi. Skype and Chrome read white noise from the mic while arecord, parecord and Zoom function correctly.

System: Ideapad 320-15IKB laptop, "HDA Intel PCH" sound, pulseaudio, KDE, Gentoo.

Symptoms: arecord, aplay, parecord, paplay and Zoom work fine, indicators in KDE settings whow that the microphone works. Skype and Chrome record audio as static noise and gibberish. Alsamixer displays "PulseAudio" as capture device. It is not muted in pavucontrol.

Once I already tried to fixed this, and after some manipulations (that didn't change anything in the end) Skype started working. Updating to PipeWire did nothing. The problem existed on other distributions.

Also arecord cannot record anything except of 44100 s16le stereo. Even if I give it other options, it does record, but the recordings are static noise. aplay/arecord also sometimes disables pulseaudio sound (not complaining, but might help to mention).

Some help please? Thank you.

Hello & welcome to LQ. I don't normally recommend adjusting your handle, but Marmalade_Insanity sounds like a title for a '70s album, not a person. Even mine is long.

To business: In pavucontrol under pulseaudio, you can configure inputs. I presume there's something similar in pipewire. Likewise alsa has the drivers and that has alsamixer. What's going on there? Make sure nothing's muted. Some silly icons in pavucontrol do that.

I wouldn't give this long. If your microphone is dud, buy a set of earphones with a built in mic. Or borrow something and see whether an external mic fixes it. Otherwise it's a configuration problem.

Thank you for the reply. The issue was "fixed" by scrolling "right front" microphone slider to zero. Sound quality is still horrible, but now it's a new issue I guess.

Quality can be affected by having some volumes too high. Usually there's a setting in alsamixer, and another in pavucontrol. Make sure no setting on alsamixer is in the red, and that all 'Mic Boost' settings are at zero. If volume is insufficient that way, give them 10% each, and slowly work up. Values over 100% on pavucontrol sarifice quality. I presume something similar applies in pipewire.

Also, with pcs, expect low-fi. You won't be disappointed.