Microphone does not work HP dv4

So I was trying to record audio this past week variously using Audacity, Traverso, and the Sound Recorder application that came pre-installed with Ubuntu 9.10, and, well, none of them work. I have an HP Pavilion dv4 with a built-in mic (pretty sure it's stereo) and would like to find a way to make it work... the microphone input jack also did not work. When I press "record" in any of those programs, the program doesn't respond - the "record" icon clicks, but for example the cursor on Audacity doesn't move.

Traverso gave me the following error message upon startup:

"The Audiodriver Thread seems to be stalled/stopped, but Traverso didn't ask for it!
This effectively makes Traverso unusable, since it relies heavily on the AudioDriver Thread
To ensure proper operation, Traverso will fallback to the 'Null Driver'.
Potential issues why this can show up are:
* You're not running with real time privileges! Please make sure this is setup properly.
* The audio chipset isn't supported (completely), you probably have to turn off some of it's features.
For more information, see the Help file, section:
 AudioDriver: 'Thread stalled error'"

I couldn't find that help file, unfortunately, and in any case I don't know how to set up real time privileges or turn off audio chipset features, if either of those are relevant to my main issue here.

lspci tells me my sound card is "00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)"

Anybody have any suggestions?

Thank you,

Matthew.