When I first got my ThinkPad, I couldn't get the mic input to work at all, whether in audio_editor or with the navigation and dictation applications. I stumbled upon the solution by accident when I went nuts trying every possible combination of settings. When I say it didn't work, I mean you could record something but it would either create a blank recording or would only record very loud moments as a sort of "buzzing" sound. Either way, you could tell from the graphical waveform displayed with audio_editor that it wasn't recording properly.
The solution is simple, but very unintuitive and almost definitely a bug (it doesn't show up on the ThinkPad's sister system, the Personal Computer Power Series 850). You have to go into the audio_mixer application (which you should have installed in your CDE frontpanel if you use UMS with any frequency) and select Audio Mixer OFF. Then in your recording, navigation and/or dictation application you need to select high-gain mic as your input device.
For reference, my UMS levels are as follows:
UMS.msg.en_US.objects 2.2.0.0
C AIX Ultimedia Services Messages
UMS.objects
2.2.0.0 C AIX Ultimedia Services
UMS.samples
2.2.0.0 C AIX Ultimedia Services Samples
UMS.video_ext
2.1.7.0 C AIX Ultimedia Services Video
If you don't have this problem or if you have a higher level of any of these filesets working on your ThinkPad, please let me know!
Please e-mail aixtp20@tecnopolis.ca
if you have any comments!