I posted a post a long time ago on this forum requesting help. Due to life circumstances, I was never able to respond to the help I did receive. I feel bad about that, but want you to know that I will be able to properly respond now. My life just... took a wild turn for a while.
In any case, I would like some help with setting up my microphone for Jack, as I can't figure out what's going on with it.
My setup:
I have Jack2, Patchage, and Meterec installed on a Slackware 14.2+ Current system. It's not a "true" current system, as it's fairly far behind the "current" current. (Sadly, I am not able to install qjackctl, as I can not install the qt framework on this system). On boot, my system calls
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/sbin/modprobe snd-aloop
The contents of audiorc.sh are fairly straightforward:
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jackd --silent -R -d alsa -d hw:XFi -p 1024 -n 2 -r 44100 -X seq &
sleep 1
loop2jack
sleep 1
jack_load netmanager
Running aplay -l yields:
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**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: XFi [Creative X-Fi], device 0: ctxfi [Front/WaveIn]
Subdevices: 255/256
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
Subdevice #7: subdevice #7
Subdevice #8: subdevice #8
Subdevice #9: subdevice #9
Subdevice #10: subdevice #10
Subdevice #11: subdevice #11
Subdevice #12: subdevice #12
Subdevice #13: subdevice #13
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device 0: ctxfi [Front/WaveIn]
device 1: ctxfi [Surround]
device 2: ctxfi [Center/LFE]
device 3: ctxfi [Side]
device 4: ctxfi [IEC958 Non-Audio]
All right, so once I have started jackd from audiorc.sh, patchage lists the following jack clients as available:
(Note: More clients were available than shown here. I cropped the screenshot to save space and ignore irrelevant clients for the time being.)
Playing music from Sound Exchange using the ALSA driver and Aduplex pcm (the cloop client) properly sends audible sound through my sound card and to my speakers. Yay!
Now, the issue comes when I try to use meterec to record from my microphone. By the way, I am using a condenser microphone with phantom power. I have double checked that the fantom power is on, and I have tried to record audio from every single port I can find that fits a 3.5 mm jack. I have also gotten an adapter for the bigger version of the 3.5mm jack, I think 5.25mm? But yeah. I've tried those as well.
I start meterec with the following command line parameters:
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meterec -r +4 -o wav -s tmp -j meterec -f 16 -p -c
-o and -s and -j flags are just the recording output, meterec's local session config file name, and the jack client name in patchage respectively. '-f' also just refers to the refresh rate of the gui but has no sound relevance.
'-p' and '-c' just tell meterec to start in playback mode and to not manage connection to other jack clients. I handle the connections between clients myself via patchage and then start the recording session manually from within the meterec gui client here:
and the patchage client connection graph can be seen here:
All right. Now here's the issue. Meterec is currently in record mode for both channels because of the [>ONGOING] message in the upper left of the gui. But down on the lower right, we can see that for both channels, meterec is currently receiving a signal of -infdB, or basically no mic input at all.
From my research, I can think of some possible issues:
1. The sound card manual says that the 3.5mm socket for the mic is a multipurpose flexijack port, capable of being a line-in, microphone. So there could be an issue with the sound card driver. Maybe ctxfi is a generic kernel driver and a more specific one capable of handling specialized ports is needed? This is perhaps unlikely, as I *have* successfully been able to record microphone input from the pulseaudio sound system, though understandable I want to stop using pulseaudio as soon as possible, as it introduces difficulties elsewhere. <_<
2. I'm perhaps not starting the jack sound server with the correct configuration options. In the man page, it says that the default number of inputs and outputs is the maximum supported by the hardware, so ostensibly I shouldn't need to specify. But then, there are multiple devices and sub-devices associated to card 0, so maybe I need to specify something more specific? Or perhaps there is some sort of other configuration option I need to specify that I'm completely unaware of?
3. Maybe the reference level isn't set appropriately on meterec? I know that reference level has to do with how loud a particular input signal is treated in the recording, but beyond that, I don't really understand reference levels, vbu meters, et al, at all.
I wish I could think of any other possibilities, but maybe it's something else? Either way, I just want to be able to capture microphone input through jack. What on earth am I missing?
Thank you for staying with me through this fairly long post, and thank you very much for your time.