USB Webcam microphone not working until re-plugged

Solution 1:

SOLUTION:

I was looking through the output of the:

pacmd list-sources

and noticed that my * index: 1 device had state: SUSPENDED ( * - indicates that the device is the default one) There is a solution for such situation described on the wiki.archlinux So I opened /etc/pulse/default.pa and commented out the line:

load-module module-suspend-on-idle

restarted pulseaudio:

pulseaudio -k

and now in the output of the:

pacmd list-sources

* index 1 device has state: IDLE (and the state changes to RUNNING - when it's used by an application for ex. guvcview) So that's the solution. As well I'd also like to mention that I previously experienced the situation when the mic of this device wouldn't record audio at all. And the solution was to choose "Analogue Stereo Output" in the Buit-In Audio section on the Configuration tab of the Volume Control app (pavucontrol). This way I got rid of the conflict - when the system didn't know what source to use - the built-in mic or the external one.