[ltp] Volume buttons turn microphone on

[Phil]

Thanks. I'll give amixer a look.
Skype offers both ALSA and OSS as possibles, I've got mine set to ALSA.
However what I really want to know is how the volume buttons cause my 
sound levels to be set. If I knew that I could intercept and stop it 
messing with the mike and instead mess with the master volume (probably 
using amixer).

Cheers
Phil

Richard Neill wrote:
>
>
> Phil wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 on a T60 2007-63G. Everything seems to work 
>> well (although suspend to ram failed today for the first time :-( but 
>> I have a problem with the keyboard volume buttons. Instead of 
>> raising/lowering Master volume they raise/lower the Playback 
>> Microphone volume. Looking in /etc/acpi it seems that the button 
>> presses fire the vol[up|down]btn.sh scripts, which use acpi_fakekey 
>> to insert a KEY_VOLUMEUP/DOWN keypress, but I can't work out what 
>> happens next.
>>
>> Incidentally initiating a call on skype also frigs with the 
>> microphone recording settings - reducing the level so that the other 
>> party can't hear what I'm saying, but I can't anywhere to configure 
>> this.
>
> amixer  is probably what you want here - you can use it to fix the 
> mixer as you want it - just discard existing scripts.
>
> As for skype, I think skype uses the OSS sound system, not ALSA. THat 
> means that it uses a different interface, and probably requires 
> exclusive access to the sound card. How about a wrapper script: 
> skypewrapper.sh
>
>
> #!/bin/bash
> alsactl -f levels.tmp store  #save mixer levels
> skype &
> skype_pid=$!        #pid of skype
> sleep 1
> amixer sset [SOMETHING]  #fix the Mic levels.
> wait $skype_pid        #wait for skype to close
> alsactl -f levels.tmp store  #restore mixer levels
>
>
> Or, you could try ekiga instead.
>
> HTH,
>
> Richard