Hi guys. I have an Android-based phone with a basic sound recording app installed. I’ve used it on occasion to make quick and dirty recordings when it isn’t practical to get my PC-based gear set up. It’s always worked fine until now.
I tried to record something unrelated to guitar the other day. The recording app started recording, but on playback there was nothing but silence. Checked the settings and they’re fine, and confirmed the app has permission to access my mic. Still nothing. Tried phoning my Wife to check the mic itself, and it works perfectly so it is not a malfunction.
Next I opened Firefox and Google provided me with a bunch of mic-test websites. Every one I tried failed, informing me that Firefox does not have permission to access the mic… despite the fact that the permissions clearly show that it does.
So does anyone know why my phone would suddenly refuse mic access to everything other than phone calls?
Edit: I have tried Google but as is so often the case these days, get nothing but probably-AI-produced slop full of generic “solutions”, most of which are totally unrelated to the issue at hand and achieve nothing.
In my experience phones can have multiple mics. It could be that one of your mics (which is used for the recording etc) is broken but the microphone for speech (which you use to call) is still functioning correctly.
That you get a notification that Firefox doesn’t have permission (even though it has) suggests to me it is a software problem.
It can be a pain in the ass, but if a normal restart doesn’t resolve the issue my only suggestion would be a factory reset.
I’d never noticed that my phone has two mics before reading your post, one on the top and one on the bottom. Unfortunately, the A20 has no specific mic options so I can’t switch between them for testing, or specify which mic apps should use.
That said, I plugged in my headset and, once again, calls work fine. But when I try to use the sound recorder there is just silence. Interestingly, when I press the headset’s mute button the sound recorder recognises this and pops up a “no input” notification. So it knows there is a mic and it thinks it is working, but no sound gets recorded.
Another app I have which uses the mic is the Fender tuner app. Tried that just now, and it also does not pick up any sound at all.
This is a really frustrating issue, and I certainly don’t want to be doing a factory reset… especially as it may not even work!
Found a way to test the mics, at least. Opened my camera app, started recording a video and blew into the two mic holes. Both mics are definitely working just fine. And of course, my camera app has no problems accessing them.
So yeah… no closer to an actual solution, but at least I know it’s not hardware.
It’s a more common problem, apparantly. One user specifically mentioning calls and camera to work but not other apps. Unfortunately the only user that got their problem fixed is one that renewed the usb-c port/microphone…
Nice to know that Samsung doesn’t much care about the difficulties of it’s users. I do wonder why companies bother having “support” forums at all sometimes.
There’s been an interesting development on my end though. Looking further into the sound recorder’s settings I found a gain control. It was set to use the system gain. I switched to manual and… presto. The mic started working. (It’s the bottom mic incidentally, the same one used to make calls.)
Of course, the vast majority of apps do not include their own mic gain settings. The Fender app still can’t hear anything. So it seems perhaps there’s a bug which causes the system gain to be reduced to zero for apps? There are literally no mic settings anywhere on the phone so there’s no way to tell.
So yeah… app now works, but the overall problem remains.
Yep, i tried force closing everything, didn’t work. Tried restarting, didn’t work. Tried safemode didn’t work.
As for my phone, it’s running the latest version of Android available for this model, given that it is not jail broken or anything. And yep, my apps are all up to date.
If the above does not fix the issue I have noted that there can be a hardware fault on these phones related to the mic and USB, so if it under warranty or insurance perhaps you can get it replaced or repaired.
