Hi,
I have a SoundBlaster Live! PCI sound card. I can play sound out of it fine... mp3's, wav's whatever. When I cat /dev/urandom (or whatever) to /dev/dsp, static will come out the speakers as its suppost to (even while musics playing). I was just trying to get some voice recognition software working and realized that my microphone doesn't work. I run alsa as my sound server, and as far as I know it works well for everything about the microphone. I tried pulling the sound off /dev/dsp and all I get is little boxes, like no data is coming in... but I've done it before on a revious install (years ago I think) and would get like random jibberish and stuff espeically when sound was made into the mic... this doesn't happen now, there's no change in the boxes, they just scroll by. I've tried plugging the microphone into the mic and line in plugs on the sound card, and playing with alsaconf and permissions on /dev/dsp and I still cant get it to work. Is there something I'm missing? Why would I be able to play sound fine, and not be able to record it? My soundcard is supported by the kernel, and I think all the proper modules are loaded. I dont remember if when I catted /dev/dsp if I was using this card or not, I may have been using my old ISA card. Could somebody point me in the right dirrection? I'm trying to setup a home automation system so I can like tell my computer to change the channels on my TV and stuff :P

Well, I can look into it more when i get home, but have you check alsamixer to make sure the microphone is not muted? Also, I am not sure if /dev/dsp handles input as well as output, or not.

Hi,

Can you hear the mic but not record it, or not hear anything at all?

If you can hear the mic but cant record, have you set the mixer up correctly? (which mixer have you been using?)

I record lots through my SB live card and when ever it 'breaks' its nearly always the settings in the mixer.

I can hear stuff that I say into the mic come out through the speakers (which by the way, isn't exactly desireable) but I cannot record it. I thought that /dev/dsp handled input as well as output... I could have sworn that I piped stuff into the line in or mic port from a Stereo or TV at one time or another and could capture it from /dev/dsp... but I suppost it's possible I'm mistaken and used something else. I use alsamixer, and I've tried numerous things with that, turning the mics on and off and changing which place the mic comes from, etc, and nothing seemed to help.