Microphone not working on archlinux

Based on correspondence with the poster (see comments), it turned out that the sound card was muted inside pavucontrol.


I also met the problem of my microphone not working on Arch Linux. In my case there's no device shown under "Input Devices" in pavucontrol (It says "no input devices available"). Following the following advice from Arch Wiki fixed it for me:

  1. Run arecord -l to find out the id of the microphone in hw:CARD,DEVICE notation, e.g. if the output is

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices **** card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC269VC Analog[ALC269VC Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Then the id is hw:0,0

  1. Add the line load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0,0 in /etc/pulse/default.pa

  2. pulseaudio -k; pulseaudio -D to restart pulseaudio and activate the changes.

I'll leave it here in case somebody runs into the same problem as mine.