How to Enable the Integrated Microphone on a Dell Computer Running Ubuntu

Summary: The following article provides information about how to enable the microphone on your computer using the Ubuntu operating system.

This article applies to This article does not apply to This article is not tied to any specific product. Not all product versions are identified in this article.
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Instructions

Enable the computer's integrated microphone in Ubuntu

 

This article takes you through how to enable the integrated microphone on your Dell computer in the Ubuntu operating system.

Note: This guide is useful as some people have advised that their microphone is not working with Ubuntu. However we have found that it was turned off. This has been seen on various laptop models.

  1. Open the mixer by double-clicking the speaker icon in the menu bar.

  2. Click the Sound Settings option.

  3. Click the Input tab.

  4. Select the Integrated Microphone from the list under Record sound from.

  5. Ensure that the Integrated Microphone is not muted and that the check box is empty.

  6. Does the Input Level flutter and change when you try speaking into your microphone?

    • Yes, it does. Your microphone is working.

    • No, it does not. Carry on with the instructions.

  7. Does this change if you drag the input volume slider to maximum?

    • Yes, it does. Your microphone is working.

    • No, it does not. Go to the next step.

  8. Open the terminal window:

    The quickest way is to use the CTRL + ALT + T keyboard shortcut, by pressing all three keys simultaneously.

  9. Type the following command to list the Audio Devices and press the Enter key to run it:

    pactl list short sources

  10. Identify and copy your sound device from the list that is generated.

  11. Type the following command and swap <device> for the sound device you copied from the previous step and press the Enter key to run it:

    pactl set-default-source <device>

  12. Go back to step 6 and if the issue continues then contact us using the link in the Additional Information section to rule out a hardware issue:

Note: These steps carry across several different versions of the Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) distributions.

Additional Information

Note:

Software support is supplied by Canonical through the following methods:

Dell provides Technical Support for hardware problems on Dell computers:

Affected Products

Alienware, Inspiron, Latitude, Vostro, XPS, Fixed Workstations
Article Properties
Article Number: 000130863
Article Type: How To
Last Modified: 22 Jul 2025
Version:  5
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