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I am trying to record audio with the PS Eye on a raspberry pi model b plus (I have tried with older b models and the same issue occurs as below).

I am able to record, and playback the recording with arecord/aplay so the mic is working. However, I want to increase the mic volume as the recording is very low.

When I attempt this in alsamixer, it exits with the following error when I use F6 to change to the PS Eye soundcard:

cannot load mixer controls: Invalid argument

I also notice that the alsa-utils service will fail when the PS Eye is plugged in (fine otherwise):

sudo service alsa-utils restart
[FAIL] Shutting down ALSA...warning: 'alsactl store' failed with error message 'alsactl: get_control:259: Cannot read control '2,0,0,Mic Capture Volume,0': Invalid argument'...failed.
[....] Setting up ALSA...warning: 'alsactl restore' failed with error message 'No state is present for card CameraB409241
Found hardware: "USB-Audio" "USB Mixer" "USB1415:2000" "" ""
Hardware is initialized using a generic method
No state is present for card CameraB409241'...amixer: Mixer hw:1 load error: Invalid argument
amixer: Mixer hw:1 load error: Invalid argument
amixer: Mixer hw:1 load error: Invalid argument
amixer: Mixer hw:1 load error: Invalid argument
amixer: Mixer hw:1 load error: Invalid argument
...
done.

The problem seems to be the controls definition of the PS Eye. I would like to know the following:

  1. Where does alsamixer load the controls for a particular device from? Are they in the driver?

  2. Is there a way to increase the mic volume another way?

I am not using Pulseaudio yet but will try it if I can't fix this in alsa.

Ghanima
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RBI
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  • As per users @wn request who is suffering from the same problem: is it solved or are there any news available? – Ghanima Dec 02 '14 at 09:50
  • @Ghanima It appears that alsa does not support the PS Eye's microphone array. The only solution I have found so far is to use pulse audio instead. If anyone can solve this while sticking with alsa I would be interested in the solution. – RBI Dec 02 '14 at 13:52

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