Chromebook Microphone Recording Loud Noise

[Guest]

Hello,

When we try to use the microphone (with or without the camera active) in Flash on a Chromebook, the noise levels are very high. As a temporary fix, we can go to the Settings and change the mic level in any direction, or check the "Reduce Echo" box, and it will reduce the background noise level... sometimes for that session, sometimes for about 30 seconds, or sometimes not at all... It seems like a strange glitch.

It has become a big issue though, as many of our students and teachers need this to do online homework, and it is so loud and crackly that you can't really make out what is being said. This ONLY happens when recording via Flash on these devices.

For reference, we are using Lenovo 11e Chromebooks.

Please Help!

Thank You,

Kevin

[_maria_]

Hi,

Can you please provide detailed steps to reproduce and the URL to the site where this is happening?

Thank you.

--

Maria

[Guest]

Hello,

Unfortunately, this particular URL/Canvas system where we're seeing the error is customized to just our school system, so i'm not sure how you would be able to try it, unless you are able to access a different Canvas website.

Anyways, we go to the website address https://mccsck12.instructure.com/login/canvas and login.

Once logged in, we click on a course. We then click on "Pages" on the left-hand side, then "+ Page" to create a new one, and then we click on the "Record/Upload Media" button. Chrome pops up asking to allow microphone and camera. We click "Allow" and then the camera and mic turns on. We then also allow the Flash Player access to the mic/camera, and click the red record circle to start the recording and record something. Once you play it back, there is a constant noise and you're lucky if you can even distinguish what the person is saying...

This only seems to be occurring on our Chromebooks, as it does not do it on other devices we have tried. However, it seems that if we record anywhere other than on this particular website on these Chromebooks, we do not experience this issue. We have reached out to Canvas and they don't seem to believe it's a problem with their website.

[_maria_]

Hi,

I received your private message.  We have a Lenovo Yoga 11e Chromebook we will attempt to reproduce this on.

I hope to have an update early next week.

--

Maria

[Guest]

Great!

Thank you.

[_maria_]

We tested on Chromebook ThinkPad Yoga 11e and were not able to reproduce. Here is the system information we tested on:

Chrome://version

Google Chrome    53.0.2785.154 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Revision               68e8c5d67607d49682565ae2dbb6e1b2103553bc-refs/branch-heads/2785@{#944}

Platform                8530.96.0 (Official Build) stable-channel glimmer

Blink                     537.36 (@68e8c5d67607d49682565ae2dbb6e1b2103553bc)

JavaScript          V8 5.3.332.47

Flash                     23.0.0.162-r1

User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 8530.96.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.154 Safari/537.36

Chrome://gpu Driver Information

Initialization time                     31

In-process GPU                     false

Sandboxed true

GPU0                                    VENDOR = 0x8086, DEVICE= 0x0f31

Optimus false

AMD switchable false

Driver vendor                      Mesa

Driver version                     12.1.0

Driver date

Pixel shader version           3.00

Vertex shader version         3.00

Max. MSAA samples           8

Machine model name              

Machine model version

GL_VENDOR                     Intel Open Source Technology Center

GL_RENDERER                Mesa DRI Intel(R) Bay Trail

GL_VERSION                    OpenGL ES 3.0 Mesa 12.1.0-devel (git-b010fa8)

[Guest]

Thank you for looking in to this. All of your system's info matches ours exactly, so I guess it's not an Adobe issue, after all.

Though, now I have no clue what else could be causing the issue at this point...