Weird microphone behavior

[moonwalkers]

So I got pissed off the microphone on my PBP doesn't seem to work, and started seriously troubleshooting - made sure the levels are fine in alsamixer, looked through pavucontrol... And saw that it shows actual signal levels from the microphone, and they are fine. Closed pavucontrol, open program for recording from mic, still nothing. And then I noticed that if I launch pavucontrol when some program is trying to record something I get no mic levels, but if I first open pavucontrol and see the mic signal levels there and then start recording while pavucontrol is open I actually get sound recorded.

Has anybody seen something like that? Do you have troubleshooting tips for this - I'd like to be able to use microphone without having to open pavucontrol first. I mean, one could say that it can be considered a privacy feature :-D but it sure is inconvenient.

[vfr400racer]

So I got pissed off the microphone on my PBP doesn't seem to work, and started seriously troubleshooting - made sure the levels are fine in alsamixer, looked through pavucontrol... And saw that it shows actual signal levels from the microphone, and they are fine. Closed pavucontrol, open program for recording from mic, still nothing. And then I noticed that if I launch pavucontrol when some program is trying to record something I get no mic levels, but if I first open pavucontrol and see the mic signal levels there and then start recording while pavucontrol is open I actually get sound recorded.

Has anybody seen something like that? Do you have troubleshooting tips for this - I'd like to be able to use microphone without having to open pavucontrol first. I mean, one could say that it can be considered a privacy feature :-D but it sure is inconvenient.

I'm struggling with my mic's since I am on Manjaro. Mics were working fine on @Mrfixit2001 's image. Not sure about this, could have been @ayufan s image. No luck with microphone input on Manjaro until today. Today I installed a big update which contained a lot of alsa components. Now recording devices look different than before and monitoring input is working in audacity. However, I didn't succeed in recording something. But things are moving..
Cheers!