Voice Chat + Microphone + Sound recorder

Yesterday!

I was starting to get some shut eye in the evening when my uncle (dad’s brother aka Prof.) called.  It was the usual how are you, where are you, what are you doing call.  Suddenly, his daughter (she want’s to be an astronaut.) and her younger sister (we call her scientist, coz she wears glasses like me.)  barged into the call, and said they were chatting with another person, on gtalk, and asked me to come on chat.  I said i’ll join them as soon as i find my mic.  and set out to search for it.

It was just there lying in the first place i decided to look.  But before telling them i am comming, i decided to check if it is working.  Unfortunately, google chat did not have voice & video chat options in linux(i just hate google for that, they always do things first for that windoze and then after a huge amount of time, bring the features to linux).  But i thought atleast i could check if my microphone works in linux, so i fired up Sound Recorder. (Applications -> Sound & Video -> Sound Recorder.)

i Connected my Microphone, and then clicked on the Red Record button, the recorded time parameter was running like anything and showed that i have recorded for an hour and a few minutes, while in reality i had recorded only for ten seconds.  i wasn’t worried, but decided to check if it had got any sounds.  which it did not.  defeated.  i decided to update the system and give it a try again.

In the mean time i switched on the desktop of mine (yeah the one with the 256mb of ram) to test it there. It worked.  It worked like it should.  I wondered.  Coz, i haven’t updated the system for nearly a month or two.  Still it was able to record.  So i guessed it to be some other problem.

After updating my laptop i again tried.  but with the same result.  i Could not understand. Defeated again, and with the knowledge that my microphone works, i decided not to waste any more time, i rebooted into Windoze to chat with my cousins.

Today!

Well, it was kinda nagging me at the back of my mind since i woke up this morning.  If this is really a problem with linux and my laptop, this would be the first point that my desktop gets against my laptop. But whatever it is, linux lost out to windows in this situation.  I decided to search launchpad bugs for any pointers, and i did get something for that timer running around erratically thing. But still couldn’t find anything for not being able to use the microphone.

I read a suggestion somewhere to use audacity to check the microphone, so i did apt-get audacity, then proceeded to test the microphone with it. but audacity too was not able to handle it.  I was crashing in less than 1o seconds.  Other than that, it worked fine, cut paste audio, export to other format, apply effects etc to a mp3 file.  When i restarted Audacity, it asked if i want to recover the files from the previous crash.  I played the recovered bit, and heard what i had spoken into my microphone during those 10 secs.  So it is something with the sound hardware and Karmic, which i am not able to understand as to what it is.

I am just out of ideas as to where to look, or what to do.  anybody any suggestions?!

Sound Hardware : VT1708/A [Azaliza HDAC] (VIA High Definition Audio Controller) Stereo.