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I'm using Kubuntu 12.10 with Backports enabled and I'm getting too much noise while doing screencasting in Kazam or other aplications like Recordmydesktop, noise also appears while recording webcam with Kamoso.

I have an Acel Travellmate 5760z wich uses an i3 with an Intel HD 3000 graphics cards, I am using the webcam and mic of the laptop, so can it be a driver issue? This started happening 1 or 2 weeks ago, maybe some update gone wrong?

PS: Sorry for my bad english and thanks for taking the time.

[UPDATE] Hi, I tried Kubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) and I recorded a video with Kamoso (which records webcam) and audio was fine, no noise appeared, so it seems that this has been fixed for RaringRingtail, maybe a newer version of a Package solved that. But I still have that issue in 12.10.

[SOLVED] First, do the steps in the first answer provided by NikTh (maybe you will need to check the source), then I installed "pavucontrol" and "alsamixergui", and while doing sound recording I kept changing values until I got the combination that made my soundrecording work great.

3 Answers 3

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You can try a workaround and see if you get better recordings.

First open a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and apply the following command

arecord --list-devices 

The result should be something like this

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 0: ALC272X Analog [ALC272X Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Above are my results. So my sound card is hw:0,0

Now apply the following command

arecord -f dat -r 60000 -D hw:0,0 -d 5 test.wav

and pay attention on a specific result , here are my results

Recording WAVE 'test.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 60000 Hz, Stereo
Warning: rate is not accurate (requested = 60000Hz, got = 48000Hz)
         please, try the plug plugin

We are interesting for the got=48000 here. The number may differs.

Now see how much is the sample rate in pulseaudio

cat /etc/pulse/daemon.conf|grep sample-rate

Result

; default-sample-rate = 44100

means that is not the appropriate.

Change it with the below command to the appropriate value (it this case 48000)

sudo sed 's/; default-sample-rate = 44100/default-sample-rate = 48000/g' -i /etc/pulse/daemon.conf 

Now see again the result

cat /etc/pulse/daemon.conf|grep sample-rate

should be

default-sample-rate = 48000

Restart you PC and retest the sound recording.

Source

If above workaround not fix the issue , then maybe you should consider to buy an external USB microphone

OR

use a program like audacity to remove the background noise. Here is a PPA for audacity - Ubuntu

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  • Hi, thanks for your answer. I did what you said (and I checked source); after restarting I tried this command: arecord -f dat -r 96000 -D hw:0,0 -d 5 test.wav That generated a .wav file on my home directory, I listened to it and recording was fine! noise was deleted. So I got excited and tried to do some screencasting (using Kazam) and the result was that noise appeared again. So, i decided to re-run the command and generate another .wav file, everything fine, no noise. Now I don't know what's actually happening, I'm very confused right now :S Thanks again!
    – Thundlayr
    Mar 19, 2013 at 20:40
  • @Thundlayr try to instsall the latest kazam from this PPA and retest. Also you can use gtk-recodmydesktop and see if sound is better there.
    – NickTux
    Mar 19, 2013 at 22:33
  • Hi!, I was already using lastest version of Kazam, microphone recording seems to work only with that command, I even tried Google Webcam recording (this a tool wich allows you to upload webcam videos to Youtube) and sound have noise too. Kamoso made noise and Recordkydesktop too. Could this be a problem with the Gstreamer configuration of PulseAudio or something like that? I have installed the gstreamer0.10-good-plugins package, which it seems to be necessary (according to Arch Linux Wiki)
    – Thundlayr
    Mar 19, 2013 at 22:48
  • Really I don't know what else I could suggest. I had the same problem and I solved it once and for all when I bought a USB headset.
    – NickTux
    Mar 21, 2013 at 11:53
  • Hi, I tried Kubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) and I recorded a video with Kamoso (which records webcam) and audio was fine, no noise appeared, so it seems that this has been fixed for RaringRingtail, maybe a newer version of a Package solved that. But I still have the issue in 12.10. So, I will wait until 13.04 is released as Stable and later I will buy a USB headset. Thanks for all responses!
    – Thundlayr
    Mar 21, 2013 at 12:04
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I solved it. First, do the steps in the first answer provided by NikTh (maybe you will need to check the source), then I installed "pavucontrol" and "alsamixergui", and while doing sound recording I kept changing values until I got the combination that made my soundrecording work great.

Hope this helps, Thank you for everything!

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  • Please don't forget to click the checkmark next to your answer to accept it and properly mark this question as solved. Thank you! Dec 3, 2014 at 19:54
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Here's another possible solution:

  1. Open Kazam and go to File -> Preferences
  2. Under General check to see what's listed as the source for "Microphone."

In my case, it was using the microphone from my webcam as the source by default, which is why I was getting all the noice. I switched it to "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" and the noise went away.

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  • 1
    This was the solution for me, especially since this is my first time using headphones in the past 6 years and the Preference was still using the camera mic instead of the headphones. I would also add to this that the volume control in the Kazam preferences is used to know how much volume you want to capture. It is not related to the actual mic volume found in the Sound Settings of Ubuntu. In my case I put the kazam mic volume 100% and then adjusted the Sound volume to meet the correct amount. Jan 4, 2015 at 16:08

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