Polycom Communicator Low Mic Volume

Dear Lazyweb,

UPDATE – READ BELOW THE SOLUTION

I am having troubles getting my Polycom Communicator for Skype speakerphone working in Ubuntu – the microphone volume is always very low in Skype, and when I try to adjust the mixer volume slider for the mic, there is no luck. This does not appear to be a Skype issue – I tried recording in Audacity and the problem exists there too.

Has anyone found a fix for this, and does this exist on other distros?

UPDATE: Solution

Much thanks to Tom Mann who left a comment to point to his forums post with a possible solution. Well, I did the following, and it worked:

sudo alsactl store
sudo cp /var/lib/alsa/asound.state /var/lib/alsa/asound.state.old
sudo nano /var/lib/alsa/asound.state

I then found the state.Communicator block and the sub-block with name 'Mic Capture Volume' – the value was set to 0, so I set it to the maximum value, which is 64. My block looks like this:

control.2 {

            comment.access 'read write'

            comment.type INTEGER

            comment.count 1

            comment.range '0 - 64'

            iface MIXER

            name 'Mic Capture Volume'

            value 64

    }

Then unplug the Polycom Communicator and plug it back in again. It should now work. 🙂

9 Comments

blindvic on June 17, 2008 at 10:52 am

I don’t know about Ubuntu, but WinXP in such cases i enable mic boost

Aidan Delaney on June 17, 2008 at 11:44 am

Jono, there’s an input and output slider for the Mic. Are you sure you’re toggling the input slider and not the output (speaker volume) slider?

Or use Ekiga, it plays nicely with pulseaudio etc…

Mike Gratton on June 17, 2008 at 1:17 pm

If you’re using Pulse Audio and have the “Let Skype automatically adjust the volume level” option check, Skype helpfully keeps the microphone level zeroed. Untick that option and readjust the levels manually.

/Mike

Zach on June 17, 2008 at 5:49 pm

I have found what mike says to be true on every version of Linux I use, the mic adjust feature in Skype is worthless.

Tom Mann on June 17, 2008 at 9:56 pm

The EeePC has the same problem with it’s Microphone – I have found the fix for that works quite well for me – I have posted the fix for the EeePC, as something to try, to the Ubuntu Forums.

Quad on January 18, 2009 at 9:33 pm

wonderful post))

adithya on April 17, 2009 at 1:18 pm

thanks for the post, my mic seems to be better now.. although there;s a little bit of lag

Kenny on September 25, 2012 at 9:19 pm

Jono are you still using the Polycom with a more contemporary version of Ubuntu? I just dusted off my device and wondered whether it would work with 12.04? the speaker works fine out of the box, but the microphone appears to have the same issue…