Good old Skype, it seems to have been in Linux Beta forever! I suppose now that Skype is part of the happy Microsoft “family”, it probably always will.
Anyway, I recently had a problem where Skype would not open on my Ubuntu 11.04 laptop. Well, to be precise, Skype opened and closed immediately. The solution was simple enough. Read more…
It’s strange sometimes how things that should be simple can start to seem very complicated. A case in point is Skype on Kim’s Acer Aspire One. I have Skype working very well on my laptop, but after installing it on Kim’s, the microphone didn’t seem to be working at all!
Obviously, I’d followed my own advice in a previous post. I also confirmed that the microphone was working in Sound Recorder, but when I made a Skype test call, the conversation was very one-sided indeed.
A lot of digging around showed that PulseAudio treats everything as stereo – even if the microphone is mono! The two inputs cancel each other out, resulting in a stony silence for whoever you’re trying to talk to on Skype.
The solution is as follows: Read more…
No major niggles or problems after upgrading to 9.10 – in fact I’m running out of superlatives to describe Karmic. My wife has long since given up listening to me extol some new-found virtue of this distribution. As I launched into an enthusiastic lecture on the new-look UI with smaller icons and beautifully anti-aliased fonts, the pitying look of incomprehension that crept unbidden across her face spoke volumes.
Anyway, one thing that did stop working for me after the upgrade was Skype. This isn’t generally a problem, I don’t use Skype all that much, but this week I needed to use it for an important video call at work. Whilst Skype loaded fine, none of the sound devices seemed to work, and the test call was quieter than my wife’s reaction to Karmic’s faster shutdown speed. I had “pulse” listed as my default audio device, which seemed to be correct, but nothing was happening. I also tried “Intel hw:0,1″ and “Intel hw:0,3″, but still no joy.
Although I was using the latest version, I decided to uninstall Skype using the Synaptic Package Manager. I marked each Skype package for Complete Removal, which would remove any configuration files and user data.
I then reinstalled Skype from this link (or if you have Ubuntu 64bit, then this link). Just download the package, and then open it for installation. Things were better from the outset, because at least this time Skype made a noise on loading. When I checked the options, I could see that the sound devices were now referred to differently “PulseAudio server (local)” rather than the multitude of options I had previously.
I found it best to uncheck the box that says Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels, and then to set the microphone volume through the System -> Preferences -> Sound applet. If I allowed Skype to adjust the sound automatically, then I could hear people perfectly, but they couldn’t hear me – it practically turned off my microphone.
Then, all that was left to do was to add Skype to start automatically, which is easy:
It seems that Ubuntu 9.10 is more dependent on PulseAudio than previous releases, and I’ve read a lot of blogs indicating that this may not be a good thing. I’m going to do more research before I give an opinion, but suffice to say that the above procedure fixed my Skype audio problem.
Audio options in Skype
