Internal Microphone super loud and cracky

mikilinux

Hello! I’ve tried various distros, and then I switched to Solus.
I noticed that only on Solus, the internal microphone records at a very high volume and sounds crackly.
The input volume bar is always at 100%, and I can only fix it by reducing it to 10% in the sound settings (I’m using KDE).
It’s kind of strange. I have a Realtek driver.
Maybe a package is missing (like noise reduction?), or maybe it’s a settings issue…
Can you help me? 🙂
I tried Debian and Fedora, and this doesn’t happen there.

pomon

Try:
wpctl (PipeWire native)

Check the mic ID with: wpctl status
Example output:

Sources:
 * 53. Built-in Audio Analog Stereo [vol: 1.00]

Set the volume to 10%: wpctl set-volume 53 0.10

mikilinux

Thank you very much, but this command—like others I've tried—lowers the volume in exactly the same way as using KDE's volume control.
I need to find a way to make the microphone less loud in general.
It seems like there's a kind of input volume limiting that's missing here, which is instead present on other distributions.

mikilinux

Forgive the inaccuracy. It happens on all distros if I use Pipewire.
The trick for now is to keep the volume at 30%.

TraceyC

If I understand you correctly, you've lowered the gain on the microphone, but it gets reset to 100% every time you reboot? You've also said it happens with any distro if pipewire is being used. This points to the problem being rooted in pipewire.

I recommend looking through the issues list in the pipewire repo. If you don't find your issue there, file a new one. Good luck!

mikilinux

TraceyC Yes, basically it can be summed up like this:
Pipewire has some strange issue with my internal microphone… At 100% the volume is insanely loud and completely unusable. To make it usable, you have to keep it below 30%. It seems like it has now remembered the setting, so I’m keeping it that way… thanks 🙂