I have been trying to troubleshoot microphone input issues on my Thinkpad T14 gen1 (AMD) running Fedora 36. The microphone is detected and listed in Gnome Settings as “Digital Microphone - Family 17h/19h HD Audio Controller”. However, if I select the device, set the volume/sensitivity to 100%, and try to record audio using arecord or audacity, there is no signal at all. Another odd thing is that the red bars under the device in Gnome Settings, which usually indicate the input level, do “light up” but do not change with the noise level. Instead, they just track with the volume setting of the microphone, with all bars showing red if the volume is set to 100% (regardless of the noisiness of the environment).
I am curious if others have observed the same problem with relatively recent Lenovo devices.
My only lead so far is that the ArchWiki Thinkpad page marks the Thinkpad T14 gen1 AMD model as requiring a number of extra packages/drivers.
The alsa-firmware package contains firmware that may be required for certain sound cards (e.g. Creative SB0400 Audigy2).
sof-firmware and/or alsa-ucm-conf are required for some newer laptop models (mainly since 2019) because they implement their drivers with firmware provided by the Sound Open Firmware project.
However, I am not sure how to check if the proper drivers are installed/loaded by Fedora.
facing the same / similar issue. I can see the same behaviour on my device. After rebooting the mic works for some time and then basically stops working showing what you described. Have you worked aroung the problem?
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to resolve things. Rebooting doesn’t resolve the problem even temporarily for me. I have upgraded to F37 and things haven’t changed.
this does mean I loose the pipewire functionality?
This is my output:
> lspci -k | grep -i 'audio\|snd'
> 06:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio Controller
> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
> Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
> 06:00.5 Multimedia controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] ACP/ACP3X/ACP6x Audio Coprocessor (rev 01)
> Kernel driver in use: snd_rn_pci_acp3x
> Kernel modules: snd_pci_acp3x, snd_rn_pci_acp3x, snd_pci_acp5x, snd_pci_acp6x, snd_rpl_pci_acp6x, snd_pci_ps, snd_sof_amd_renoir, snd_sof_amd_rembrandt
> 06:00.6 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h/19h HD Audio Controller
> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
> Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
I siwtched to pulseaudio but everything stopped working and so I switched back to pipewire:
sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pulseaudio pipewire-pulseaudio
At least my bluetooth headset works great with that.
I’ve tried recording in audacity and yes it works fine. I’m on a Tiger lake TP (unfortunately intel-based) and was astonished that all devices (including external) were installed and fully functional in F37 Workstation immediately on the 1st boot, although the system run a bit hot. Now I’m on a newer version with a newer kernel (F39) and there’s dramatic, very feasible improvement in power efficiency thanks to the new kernel. All devices work perfectly (especially usb/thunderbolt ones that were having many issues in W10).
Personally I’ve run into problems with Gnome-based distro (that I downloaded by accident in the very begining); Gnome-based F39 did not finish install correctly and crashed during configuration, while all versions of KDE distros run great.
I would suggest you to try booting up or installing a KDE Live version of F37 (or even beta F38 or F39 as they run on newer linux kernels and have lots of significant improvements in handling of hardware) and you will immediately see if the devices will start working on your machine. The ones with the most recent kernels (F38 6.2, F39 6.3) are here: Fedora nightly compose finder
does: sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="snd_intel_dspcfg.dsp_driver=1"
and rebooting change the indications at all?
The above can be undone with sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --remove-args="snd_intel_dspcfg.dsp_driver=1"
So are you running the pulseaudio or the pipewire? You should be running pipewire as this is the preferred option in F36 where it was first used by default. Later releases all run on pipewire.
For me, pipewire solved most of my audio problems, especially with professional recording applications. They run smoothly with a reasonable latency out of the box. However sometimes, based on when the application starts, it might not be connected to the hardware automatically which resides in the absence of sound on input and/or output.
Usually, this is the case for more complicated applications with sophisticated routing possibilites, but even some more simple apps can choose their audio backend. With sound problems, you should try the following:
check if you can select the audio output in the application settings and change it to System default or something similar, unless you do not need anything else.
Make sure your sound device is working properly. The system should use the primary device when it is connected and working properly, but it will switch to a replacement device if there are problems with the primary device. Check twice if you have an external sound card.
Make sure the hardware is correctly selected. If by chance, pipewire switches the devices, you can switch it back manually. In Settings, you can open the Sound tab and choose which device should be used for input and output. Alternatively, you can use pavucontrol to do this.
You might also try the qjackctl application that will enable you to manually route the audio signal from an application to a device and back.
With pipewire, you can achieve mirracles, such as that the system sounds are played on small loudspeakers but the sound from a playing video file is played on home cinema loudspeakers. Re-routing the microphone to the correct application should be easy.
Also, I am not sure whether the mike was a system mike, a mike connected to the internal soundcard, or a usb-mike. Anyway, any of them should be routeable around your Fedora.