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Troubleshooting

Kevin edited this page Jun 10, 2022 · 13 revisions

If you have an issue with NoiseTorch, you can make it output debug information by starting it with noisetorch -log.

Please always attach this output as a file when reporting a bug in NoiseTorch. You can write this to a file with noisetorch -log > noisetorch.log.

Here are a few issues users encountered and how to solve them:

Virtual Microphone is silent

The first thing you may want to check is that your Voice Activation Threshold isn't simply set to high. Drag the slider to zero, reload NoiseTorch and see if the issue persists.

If this does not solve your problem, you should take a look at your audio with pavucontrol a.k.a. "PulseAudio Volume Control", most users should have this installed by default, but you may have to install it separately.

Go to the "Input Devices" tab and speak into your microphone, and also observe the bars when talking.

Does the bar for your regular microphone move? If it does not, then it is likely an issue with your Microphone.
If the bar for your regular microphone moves, but your NoiseTorch Microphone doesn't, go to the Output Devices tab and again speak into your microphone. Do none of the volume bars on either "Null Output", or "LADSPA Plugin Noise Suppressor for Voice (Mono) on Null Output" move? Are any of them muted?

If they do move, it may be that your microphone reports as being stereo but only sends audio on one channel. You will need to fix that up in pulseaudio yourself, the Arch wiki has a section about it

  • Make sure that you have not selected your NoiseTorch as your default microphone, e.g. via Gnome. The NoiseTorch Microphone needs to be set on individual applications and can currently not be set as the default device.

If it still doesn't work, there seems to be an issue that disproprtionally affects Manjaro Linux users, but you may still want to try it even if you don't use Manjaro.

Edit your ~/.pulse/daemon.conf configuration file, and append the folowing:

default-sample-rate = 44100

Now restart your pulseaudio by typing pulseaudio -k into a terminal. Try NoiseTorch again.

NoiseTorch is stuck on a "CAP_SYS_RESOURCE" screen and the grant capabilities button doesn't work

Check your log file for a line like

Couldn't setcap self as root: exit status 127

If you see that, your pkexec doesn't allow us to elevate. Either fix that or grant the binary the permissions yourself according to the install instructions. If you go the "not-fix-pkexec" route, you'll need to reapply that manually after each update.

If you don't see that line and

$ getcap ~/.local/bin/noisetorch

says something like

<path> cap_sys_resource=eip

then it might be that your /home is mounted nosuid. To check if your home directory is mounted in this way, run mount | grep home and check for the nosuid mount option (inside the paranthesis). For example, an output with nosuid may look like this: /dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime,nosuid).

It is also worth noting that when using ecryptfs to encrypt your home directory, you may end up in this situation. A common way to end up with ecryptfs is to choose to "encrypt home folder" during installation of a distribution. Note that these options are distribution dependent.

Noisetorch does not start

Aside from the setcap issue explained in the chapter above, it could be the case that your noisetorch binary does not have the executable flag:

chmod +x ~/.local/bin/noisetorch

My microphone is displayed in orange and says "(incompatible?)"

There is a fix available for this now, but it requires building both PulseAudio and NoiseTorch from source. PulseAudio requires this patch to trickle down into distributions.

Additionally: We have another fix on our side which has been committed and will be part of the NoiseTorch 0.11 release.

Unless you are willing to build PulseAudio from source, there is currently nothing you can do, but wait.