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.

• Launchpad bug
• Ubuntu forums thread

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. 🙂