My microphone input level has suddenly dropped

Hi there,

I don’t remember doing anything, other than shutting down ardour and starting it up the next day, but my mic input levels have dropped and I can’t see why - I can still record but it’s very quiet.

Can anyone suggest why this might be or how to fix it? In the screenshot you can see my normal recording levels, and also vocal-49.1 is my current recording level (same mic same mic position etc…). It’s not my system mic gain, normally I set that to about 65% but even at 100% I’m getting this low input level.

Mic is a Samsung Q2U usb mic plugged in to a usb port.

thanks for any help!

Are you sure that you have selected the USB mic, and not record any cross-talk from another input?

Does the mic have a software-controlled hardware mixer? check with alsamixer in a terminal. Maybe rebooting with the mic connected reset the levels there.

thanks for the reply!

I’m definitely set to the UBS mic input, tapping the usb mic produces input, tapping the other connected mics (laptop internal,and webcam) doesn’t produce any input.

here’s alsamixer, can’t see anything helpful but I’ve never opened this before so don’t really know what I’m looking for…

Screenshot from 2021-03-25 05-18-28

Press <F6> to select the Mic. then <F5> to show all controls.

thanks, ok did that, as far as I can tell seems to be fine:

Screenshot from 2021-03-25 05-27-32

Looks like the left channel of the mic is all down (0<>100) left:0%, right:100% ( -14dB on the left channel, +22dB gain on the right).

you can press Q to increases it, or arrow-down all the way and arrow-up (L+R combined).

SUCCESS!!! yes pressing Q brought the L level back up, and now my mic input level is back to normal! (Not sure why it got adjusted down, but anyway…)

THANK YOU!! I’m right now editing my podcast and this was preventing me adding any vocal edits, now I can finish my episode properly…

much appreciated!

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