Microphone not working at all in Skype

I have been able to get the built-in microphone (it's an Acer laptop) to not only work, but work perfectly in Ubuntu's own Sound Recorder, but when starting up Skype, there's no sign of my microphone at all.

I've reinstalled Skype, checked ALSAmixer and tried various settings.

I've had weird problems where the mic was muted and I had to use pavucontrol to unmute it. You can install the additional pulseaudio utilities:

sudo apt-get install paman padevchooser paprefs pavucontrol pavumeter

Check the input tab in pavucontrol and make sure its not muting your mic. You can also play with the configuration tab in case that is wrong, but note your initial setting first.

Keep in mind what arochester and Joao are saying, make sure pulseaudio is selected in the skype audio options.

I have an Acer Aspire netbook and had exactly the same problem - microphone worked for recording, would not work with Skype, only PulseAudio input available on Skype so I couldn't manually provide the microphone name.

Absolutely weirdly what worked for me was to go to my PulseAudio volume control for the input on the microphone and make sure my left and right channels were not at the same level. I have no idea why, but turning down either channel made the microphone work well enough for skype...

by these steps :-

1. Run alsamixer
2. Unmute all the outputs by pressing m
3. Press tab to go the capture settings
4. Highlight the “Mic” setting using the arrow keys.
5. Press space to enable the microphone.
6. Highlight the “Capture” setting using the arrow keys.
7. Press space to enable capture (note that just because you have volume bar here doesn’t mean it is enabled).
8. Press escape.