Microphone is not working in Skype

My solution

I think that the problem lies within a non-intuitive way of adjusting the recording settings.

Within skype, do the following:

• Open options dialog.
• Go to Sound Devices.
• Click on 'Open PulseAudio Volume Control'.

Here comes the non-intuitive part!!!

Under the 'Recording' tab...

If no program is recording anything (being in idle mode) it shows nothing at all. One might think that there is nothing to this tab of interest, but one would be mistaken!!! Keep this tab open and visible. Make sure the 'Show' option at the bottom is set to either 'All Streams' or 'Applications'.

Start a test call from the options dialog.

The pulseaudio dialog will now show what program is recording sound from where.

Skype: Input from...

To the right of this text, select your input device and it should finally work.

It took me a while to figure this one out.

Changing Device Input values under gstreamer-properties fixed it for me.

Source

I have head a similar problem on a realtek HD audio system (eeePC R101). After upgrading from Ubuntu (Xubuntu) 10.04 to 12.04, the microphone turned out to be unusable, the sound it recorded was at such a low volume that it could not be used. Using skype was not possible. After looking through a couple of forum entries I summarized people had found pulseaudio not working on this type of sound card. In contrast to older skype versions that required pulseaudio, the current skype (4.1) also uses ALSA. This, however, requires pulseaudio to be uninstalled. If you don't really need pulseaudio for other reasons, give this a try:

sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

Then reboot the system and try using skype. Make sure to turn off "allow skype to adjust mixer levels" in the audio settings and make sure in Alsamiser or XFCE4-mixer that the microphone is turned on.

Hopefully someone finds out why pulseaudio capture does not work on Realtek HD anymore.