I've just installed Zorin OS 18 and everything seems fine apart from the fact that my mic isn't working on my laptop.
It shows the device is a Family 17h/19h HD Audio Controller. I have no clue what I'm doing.
It says something about a "snd_pci_acp6x" kernel module being required for the AMD coprocessor to show, which is where the mic works from but like I said - I genuinely don't know how to do this as I'm brand new to Linux. PLS HELP!
Welcome to the forum!
Would this microphone be an external or an internal microphone? Such as one built in on a laptop? I know you say mic on your laptop, I just want to be clear. Would you happen to have the model and specs of the laptop? It could be a case of needing a newer kernel might address it, depending on how new the hardware is.
Thank you!
It's an internal microphone that's built-in. It's an Acer Aspire Go 14. AMD Ryzen 3 7320U Processor, 8GB RAM.
Ok, that's not a brand new piece of hardware. If you could, open up pulse audio volume control (pavucontrol) (and if it's not installed, you can install it easily with
sudo apt install pavucontrol
And within that menu, you can find Input devices, and there's also a tab for Configuration. Sometimes, in one of those menus, the device is simply selected wrong or configured wrong, so it's worth a simply check on that before going any further.
You could include screenshots of what you see in those menus as well, just so everyone here can see as well.
In that first tab, there's a dropdown with Headset Microphone. Is there any option in that dropdown? If there's not, in your Configuration tab dropdown for Family 17/19H, are there any other options? In my laptop (5700u amd) that's where my microphone is located. However, perhaps yours is in the dropdown for Rembrandt HD Audio Controller.
I took a video. Watch Screencast from 2026-01-24 03-05-26 | Streamable
Hmm, I'm looking online and it seems some Acer models have the problem you're describing. For some, selecting the Pro Audio option in the configuration alone is enough to fix the problem. Could you try those options first and see if you get some response from it?
So in the config tab, select "pro audio" for both of the things on there?
Yes, just to see if that kicks it into gear or not. It should be mainly the the Family 17/19 dropdown we'd want to switch, but it doesn't hurt to try both. Can always change back easily if wanted.
Tried it and it did nothing.
Could you run a
arecord -l
In the terminal and list the output? What I'm seeing that has helped some users on 24.04 is this post (https://askubuntu.com/a/1233446/1867383). Even though it is supposed to be aimed at 20.04, it seems it may work for 24.04 as well (which is what Zorin 18 is based on.
Same as my device , only mine is an Asus rather than an Acer. I think that link I shared in my previous post may be applicable to you. It's worth a try, as that seems to be what a lot of people are referencing with newer Acer devices.
I've just added the line to the bottom of the document and saved it, gonna restart now and see how it goes.
I see you selected the asus-mic option, which I don't believe would work if we're looking at your Acer machine? You could try a few different options, such as these two right in here:
Ah, I'm sorry I genuinely don't know what I'm doing and assumed it had to be straight copied. So what is it I should replace that line with?
"options snd-hda-intel model=alc256-laptop-dmic"?
In that post, they have a link to where you can find exactly which driver should match up with what your system is using (you can find that from the first step they include, to find the exact name). it may be that you need to use an option that's as close as possible (such as the first two I posted) but you'll have to run the first command
cat /proc/asound/card*/codec* | grep Codec
To be sure of exact name.
Yes, to your post you put just as I was typing this lol. But there may be a few options to choose from, it might be a bit of cat and mouse figuring out which one it exactly may be.