Mic is alaways capturing sound unless muted

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maybe it’s a Linux thing,or maybe it’s the same on windows but not apparent,
but i noticed that if i don’t mute my laptop mic,i can see the volume bar going up when there is sound around.(in KDE under the ‘audio devices’ icon on the panel.)
i would expect it to be idle by default and only get triggered when an application needs it.

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:+1: Welcome to Manjaro! :+1:

  1. Please read this:
    How to provide good information
    and post some more information so we can see what’s really going on. Now we know the symptom of the disease, but we need some more probing to know where the origin lies… :grin:
  2. An inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width would be the minimum required information for us to be able to help you. (Personally Identifiable Information like serial numbers and MAC addresses will be filtered out by the above command)
    Also, please copy-paste that output in-between 3 backticks ``` at the beginning and end of the code/text.
  3. I only see the microphone being triggered by an application on my KDE system, so could you try creating another user and see if it happens there too??? (E.G. linub2)

:+1:

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If you check PulseAudio sources for audio capture ( pactl list sources ) it would show
that PulseAudio is state: IDLE when not in use
But it would show State: RUNNING if KDE audio controls are monitoring microphone audio

Microphone capture would still be active in ALSA even if a sound server is not using it.
most hardware does not have hardware monitoring to provide ALSA level meters but there is usually a level control for monitoring microphone audio in alsamixer

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i ran your command;
with the mic muted,it all shows suspended,with the mic un-muted, i get ‘idle’ on a few “sources”.

i’m not sure i fully understood what you said about alsamixer,but is there anything i can do about it?

muting the Mic isn’t that bad,i was just surprised/concerned by this default behavior on my system and wanted to know if others experience it as well.(@Fabby doesn’t seem to)
that’s why i originally posted it in non technical questions.

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