Microphone selection deliberately broken in Chromium-based browsers...

[mikewalsh]

Evening, gang.

Now; I wonder if anybody else has noticed this in recent weeks?

Until the last couple of updates, you were always able to go into Chrome's 'content' settings and select the microphone you wished to use from a drop-down list. With recent updates, they've dropped this behaviour, and have set things so that the browser now automatically uses whatever you've selected via global, system-wide settings.

Great. This is fine if you've got a laptop. Lappies all have a built-in microphone which - surprise, surprise - is automatically set as default. But what are we supposed to do for a desktop rig?

No desktop, to the best of my knowledge, comes with a built-in mike. You always have to plug something into a desktop rig to be able to have a microphone.....and anything that's plugged-in has to be selected.

Okay.....don't say it. I know exactly what some of you are going to suggest. PulseAudio will let you do this.....and if I'm NOT using a modern Puppy with built-in PulseAudio, then why the hell not? To which I answer this; ALSA-only systems were the "norm" before PulseAudio came along. I've always disliked PulseAudio, have always found it clunky & awkward to use compared to Retrovol's svelte simplicity, and on this rig especially, most of the time it only "sees" headphones (it won't detect the onboard system audio chip at all).

In short, I don't like PulseAudio, and refuse to have anything to do with it. I want to set a default microphone using ALSA.

I refuse to believe that ALSA does not have a way to select default hardware. I also refuse to believe that being able to select hardware audio items only became a reality when PulseAudio came along. What on earth did people do before PulseAudio?

Are desktop rigs really so "old-fashioned" that we're being treated as the 'poor relation' now..?

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Would I be right in thinking this is a job for an /asound.conf file somewhere in the system? Y'see, I have three microphones altogether (or four, if you want to be pedantic); a stereo "pair" built-in to the Logitech c920 HD 'Pro' webcam, and a 'boom' microphone built-in to each of two different headsets.....both of which are USB devices - NOT analog - and also have their own built-in audio cards. But none of them is a separate, stand-alone device on its own; in every case, the microphone is part of a bigger device.

However, the headsets (these are what I tend to use for recording & video chat) DO have separate controls for PCM and Input level, so.....perhaps an asound.conf file that further specifies a sub-device, yes? Would this work?

Thoughts, sensible suggestions/ideas would, as always, be very much appreciated. And please, guys; do NOT mention PulseAudio. I'm NOT interested.

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

'Kay. Let me 'update' y'all a bit.

The Puppy that's giving me microphone grief in all browsers is my erstwhile 'daily driver', jrb's 'lite' spin on Barry's elderly Quirky64 April 7.0.1. This thing, despite unbelievable stability, IS getting pretty long in the tooth now.....almost 9 years old.

I've worked a whole series of small miracles to keep it functional and relevant over the last 2-3 years.....aided, I think, by the fact that many of the core libraries that Barry compiled when building this were extremely new, cutting-edge versions. Hence why they've remained functional for so long.

But all good things come to an end. Newer Pups from Bionicpup64 onwards seem to handle the microphone stuff without issue, so I think it's high time I upgraded my "daily driver". I'll probably make Fossapup64 9.5 my default Puppy for the forseeable future. See how long that lasts..!

Mike.

[fredx181]

Okay.....don't say it. I know exactly what some of you are going to suggest. PulseAudio will let you do this.....and if I'm NOT using a modern Puppy with built-in PulseAudio, then why the hell not? To which I answer this; ALSA-only systems were the "norm" before PulseAudio came along. I've always disliked PulseAudio, have always found it clunky & awkward to use compared to Retrovol's svelte simplicity, and on this rig especially, most of the time it only "sees" headphones (it won't detect the onboard system audio chip at all).

In short, I don't like PulseAudio, and refuse to have anything to do with it. I want to set a default microphone using ALSA.

I feel with you Mike, oh yes!
(why aren't things like in the seventies ? oh, no there weren't any computers back then )
But you want to run a modern browser ? Then need to 'go with the flow' of recent developments, can be a pain, but that's life...
(not saying btw there's no possible workaround to use just ALSA, perhaps there is )

[mikewalsh]

@fredx181 :-

Hah. Oh, I'm glad I'm not the only 'hold-out' in this arena, Fred.

My first taste of PulseAudio was in my first-ever distro, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS....the "Trusty Tahr". Okay, it took some getting used to, but I'd just managed to conquer the learning-curve, when what do Canonical go and do? Some bright spark decided that the next custom kernel compile was going to drop support for the ancient ATI video chip in the elderly Compaq desktop rig.

Virtually overnight, Ubuntu became all but unusable. And Unity's hardware-accelerated requirements weren't helping none, either!

(I suppose I should thank them, really. If it weren't for this happening, I would never have bothered to take a look at the newly-released Tahrpup 6.0 CE. And having found that absolutely everything worked OOTB, well......the rest, as they say, is history. I was hooked.)

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Having said about PulseAudio in the newer Puppies not "seeing" the HP's onboard system audio - it's true! - I will probably stick with FP64-9.5 for as long as I possibly can. I'm trialling radky's v4 'upgrade', as well as jrb's Jammypup64 ATM. Both lovely Puppies, but that PulseAudio glitch (headphones or nothing) is spoiling my enjoyment of them summat chronic. So; I don't know.....

Mike.

[BarryK]

Mike,
You've got me curious!

EasyOS 5.3.2 has pulseaudio, but also attempts to be compatible with alsa-only apps.
Also, the default browser is Chromium, an LTS version, currently 112.0.5615.165
...and cannot find anywhere to select a microphone.
maybe it was a Chrome-only enhancement?

I capitulated re pulseaudio a couple of years ago. It made everything far simpler to go with the flow. Bluetooth support for example.

I'm curious whether Easy will recognize your onboard HP audio. I try to keep support for old hardware. Maybe it is a kernel config issue.

[mikewalsh]

@BarryK :-

You're curious? I'm just "annoyed"..!

No, this was never a Chrome-only enhancement. Until very recently, ALL the Chromium-based 'clones'.....Iron, Slimjet, Brave, even MSEdge.....had this ability. It must be a 'sea-change' at the Chromium Project; somebody amongst the multitude of developers has decided to take a leaf out of Mozilla's book, and build the browser to use whatever microphone has been selected via system settings (instead of giving the user a separate choice).

Probably because the vast majority of people use either a mobile phone OR a laptop.....ALL of which have built-in microphones OOTB, and which will automatically get selected by the system as the 'default'.

Because desktop rigs have to have a microphone plugged-in to be able to use one, that needs to be 'selected' at some point. And not all distros 'auto-detect' the microphone on, say, a permanently plugged-in webcam....

The masses are being catered-for, with the intention of making their lives easier. Those of us who don't 'fit the mould' are being left out in the cold.

There's no references yet to this issue online, because it's such a recent change (and probably doesn't affect many people anyway). What references/articles can be found online are at least a couple of years old, and refer back to when the browsers still HAD this ability.

It's not like they've simply 'hidden' the ability to select microphones. It seems to have been completely removed from the code base.

(*grumble, grumble...*)

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

@fredx181 / @BarryK :-

Right. Now then.....

Quite by accident, I've discovered the "fix" for this. It's sorta like page number 1 in the "How to use Linux" beginner's handbook.

It's permissions, of all things..!

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I got to thinking; I couldn't understand why my microphone had stopped being recognised by not just ONE video-chat site, but multiple sites. So I did a wee bit of research.....

.....the upshot of which was that I found this article over at HowToGeek:-

https://www.howtogeek.com/411117/how-to ... in-chrome/

The article is 4 years old, so the layout of Settings has changed somewhat. However; the basic idea is the same.

I use the following video-chat services:-

• Google's "Meet"

• Google's "Duo" (works better on my sister's iPhone than 'Meet' does)

• Jitsi

• Wire, and

• Skype (for those family members wedded to Windows, who won't even consider trying anything else)

In all the above, microphone access was gone.....and in Skype, there was no camera, either. So, I followed the suggestions; revoked microphone permissions for all five, and did the same for camera permissions in Skype.

I then re-visited all 5 sites in turn, re-granting permissions as & when requested. And whaddya know? Not only was the microphone functional again in each site, but the ability to select from multiple microphones was back as well!

Interestingly, the microphone was also back in the 3 Electron-based versions of some of the above that I use; Jitsi, Wire & Skype (the so-called 'desktop clients'). These had also gone AWOL, and were now behaving themselves once more.....

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My guess? At some point with one of the last 2 or 3 updates, Google had pushed out some kind of security 'fix' or 'upgrade', which basically reset permissions right across the browser.....thereby requiring the user to reset everything back again to where they wanted it.

I've been with Google for more years than I care to remember. By and large, their 'eco-system' of inter-connected apps works brilliantly well.....but they DO have this annoying habit of dropping/removing/changing major functionality on a semi-regular basis, seemingly on a whim.

I just wish they'd have the courtesy to tell their user-base what they're actually doing once in a while..!

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

@BarryK :-

Following my account in the last post, it would seem that, far from removing the ability to select audio input sources, Google (in the shape of their R & D department - a.k.a The Chromium Project) have in fact made this control more granular than ever before.

Previously, you could select the input source to use in the Settings.....which then applied globally, across the entire browser. Current behaviour is now to withhold the ability to choose until permission for the site in question has been granted, but THEN to let you specify the device you want to use from a drop-down selector. And this behaviour can be customised on a per-app/per-site basis; I can set Google's "Meet", say, to use the built-in stereo mikes on the Logitech webcam.....and at the same time I can configure the Skype web-app to use the microphone on my Logitech headset instead.

This explains why you can't find it anywhere in the Settings.....because this is all selected at a different stage of the process, at the point where you grant microphone/camera access to any given URL for the first time. And in the case of most of the video-chat webapps, they will also have their own settings panel for all this stuff somewhere on the site itself.

If you want to change things at any point after this, you reset permissions back to the default setting - "Blocked" - then re-grant permissions again next time you use that site. A bit clunky, perhaps, bit it DOES do the job.....and seems to work pretty effectively.

So, um.....sorted. (I think....) Or at least, until the next major change, anyway..!

Mike.