... with a cold nursing a hangover on a bad day.

The recording drops me a couple of octaves and slows me down something wicked.

Funnily enough, however, arecord works just fine on the command line.

I (think I) have tried both the gstreamer and vlc backends (didn't log out in between changing, hence the uncertainty), but the result remains Mary Shellian as described above.

Oh, and the programme where I sound like that is skype. Am using the latest KDE and have an up-to-date system.

No pulseaudio, got alsa-lib, alsa-utils and 32 bit alsa libs (required by skype) installed but using phonon and am at my wit's end.

Any offers/pointers?

As far as I know, Skype doesn't use Phonon, so the interference can't be coming from there. Have you tried using lsof to check which devices Skype is opening to use the microphone? It could be using a legacy interface which isn't too compatible with your sound card.

lsof - what an über-tool!!! Never been near it, so got some homework to do. Thanks for the hint and hasta la vista...

Wow, lsof is a beast and I am unsure how to get the info you are after. Can you help me along here? All I can do is grep and that doesn't get me anywhere it seems.

You will likely be looking for accesses to /dev/snd or /dev/dsp*

Thank you. I was starting to get into lsof -Dr and failed miserably...

Like so?

Code: Select all

toad@archtop 503\3 ~ > lsof |grep skype|grep dev

toad@archtop 504\4 ~ >

As you can see skype ain't there.

Very unusual. Virtually all apps have to interface with something under /dev as part of their operation. What is the output of "lsof | grep -i skype"?

There is rather a lot of output:

http://pastebin.com/exxaJpmM

Unfortunately I don't know what is going on there, it is almost like Skype is using a seperate process to perform actions involving Audio, as the process doesn't have ALSA or Pulseaudio libraries loaded.

Okay, I'd better pester the skype forums, but thank you very much for your help.