No sound from Mic

[Angelus88]

Hello everyone I'm here looking for your help again.

I'm trying to do a shell script to have some kind of speech recognition.
I found a script that records sound from the mic, saves it to a file, sends this file to the google's stt (speech to text) website and converts it to text.
Then I want to use this text to turn off/on a lamp that is connected to my relay which is also connected obviously to my RPi.

The relay is already working using:

echo "1" (or "0") > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value

The problem is with the mic,
I bought a cheap usb sound card that has a mic input.
If I try to play a mp3 file with the usb sound card, it works (the sound is a bit "clicky" but no big deal).
If I try to record something from the mic and play the saved file, there's no sound.

Any advice?

This is my alsamixer window:

[PiGraham]

It could be a dead mic. If you tap the mic on the table while recording, and playback at max volume, can you hear any sound at all?

The problem is probably with the signal level. Many microphones produce very low signal levels, and most sound card "mic" inputs are only really suited to "line" levels, such as you get from an mp3 player. You could use a microphone preamp, a better sound card which has a mic preamp built in or get a better microphone. USB microphones should work, I think.

[ea4frz]

Hi!

Get more gain with the mic input and try "disable autogain" and more options.

Clicking on audio output? try to play the MP3 song with less volume.

See Around!