Can I urge the OP to run a different command first and below an explanation of sorts.

Above is a laptop ...notice second command detects I inserted a headphone 3.5mm jack.
Therefore, as I know my lappie....the mic claiming to be on the right
should be the internal. Of course the holes you find on your PC will differ to mine.

Ah, I must have accidentally messed things up before I ran the alsa-info.

I have now unmuted and set all Mic values to 100%...

http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=255d65...56dc3d1aad2e8e

...but it makes no difference. And the 'Mic' and 'Internal Mic' devices are still listed in "playback" rather than "capture", which I can't help thinking may be the real problem. Or is this nothing out of the ordinary? (I have very little experiece with audio)

Also, I'm guessing it's the 'Internal Mic' that I should be looking at, which is also un-muted and 100%.

@aus9

> hdajacksensetest
Pin 0x18 (Pink Mic, Rear side): present = No
Pin 0x21 (Black Headphone, Left side): present = No

Plug headphones in...
> hdajacksensetest
Pin 0x18 (Pink Mic, Rear side): present = No
Pin 0x21 (Black Headphone, Left side): present = Yes

Which to me seems about right - I have no external Mic plugged in. But I have a feeling I'm, missing the point here???

I wanted to see if it would show the built in mic.
I assume you agree you are only seeing pink hole and have pink hole.

What's "pink hole"? I have no idea what the colours are referring to - I'll go and find out though.

Edit: Ok - I got it. It would be much simpler if they were described as "in" and "out" though. Who makes this stuff up???

But just to clarify, I don't care about the external input (jack) - I just want the built-in mic to work (the first step of which, I'm thinking, is to get it to identify itself as a Mic rather than a speaker - which it seems to think it is, I think).

Would you normally expect hdajacksensetest to recognise the internal Mic? ie, despite its name, it doesn't JUST deal with external (jack) inputs/outputs?

And re the link you posted - I have read that before, but found it mostly incoherent; it's very badly written. And doesn't seem to provide any hints for the problem I have.

It is perplexing, and I wonder if the internal mic is being disabled when external headphones are plugged in for some reason. Can you check the reported capture devices when nothing external is connected?

Another thought I had is whether a specific snd-hda-intel option might be needed for this hardware...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/late...alc3xxx-models

Thanks for the continuing help, but I'm starting to come round to the idea that this just doesn't work - driver support, whatever?

I tried the link you posted and have tried all the options that looked even just vaguely like they may work - anything with dell, xps, or alc*** in the name. Most gave me no Mic devices at all, some of them produced similar results to what I get with laptop-amic but none of them actually work.

As for the jack socket and headphones - I have nothing plugged into the jack socket and the alsa-info links I posted up earlier were with nothing plugged in. If I DO plug headphones in they work fine - I've never had any problems with audio out, either via the jack socket or the internal speakers.

Okay, then I can only suggest submitting a bug report for this.

FIXED

I can't believe I'm posting this, but it turned out the mic was disabled in the BIOS! It never occurred to me that there was even a setting for it, and I only looked when I spotted another post somewhere that included the words "...it's enabled in the bios...".

So, after enabling it, I can confirm that the modprobe configuration...

options snd-hda-intel model=laptop-amic

...works. To get the mic working with reasonable levels, I set the following in alsamixer;-

- Master - 84
- Headphones - 56
- Speaker - 100
- PCM - 75
- Mic - Mute
- Mic Boost - 53
- Capture - 26 and capture enabled
- Digital - 25
- Internal Mic - 60 (capture disabled)
- Internal Mic 1 - Capture enabled (there is no volume control for this)
- Internal Mic Boost - 53
- Internal Mic Boost 1 - 53
- Loopback - Disabled

(all other values are either not changeable or don't seem to do anything useful)

The mic is still showing up in the "playback" section on alsamixer rather than the "capture" section which I don't understand at all. But it seems to work ok so maybe I'm just misunderstanding the meaning of "playback".

So there you go - I was just being an idiot! :-) (which is annoying because I have wasted many hours on this)

Well done!!! I'm also surprised that it could be controlled via the BIOS, but I guess it's all part of security features these days. Thanks for reporting back, as it may well be useful to others who come searching.