1. Hands Free Microphone For Church

Hi,

Oct 15, 2009  I have Windows Vista, and my microphone volume keeps changing by itself. I only use the microphone for MSN for live calls, and the volume won't stay at a reasonable level for the other person to hear me. The microphone is built in to the laptop, if that matters. I've tried everything I know, hopefully one of you has the answer for me.

Thank you for your response.

I suggest you to follow the steps below and check if it helps.

Does the issue persist only with Skype?

Method 1: Manually turn up the mic gain

1. Type in “Sound” in the Search box and select Sound (Control Panel) from the list.

2. Select the Recording tab.

3. Right-click (or tap and hold) on the active microphone input device and select Properties.

4. Select the Levels tab.

Manually drag the Microphone gain to a higher level and click Apply.

Method 2:Check your microphone’s drivers

Hands Free Microphone For Church

1. Type in “Device Manager” in the Search box and select it from the list.

2. Expand Sound, video and game controllers

3. Right-click (or tap and hold) your microphone device and select Update Driver Software.

4. Select Search automatically for updated driver software.This option will scan the Internet for the correct version of the driver or determine if you already have the most recent driver installed.You may be prompted to restart your computer to install the driver.

Keep us posted on this issue so that we can assist you better.

I want to disable the way the microphone lowers itself depending on the input. Here is an image:

The microphone started at 100% and slowly started to drop to where the image is showing. This is because of either a background noise or the user raising their voice. In any case, I would like to prohibit this behavior because when it gets too low, the need to raise the voice will be actually needed.

So is there an option or configuration file where one can edit and change this behavior?

This is not related to only one app but several, ranging from Skype to Google Hangouts, Empathy to Teamspeak and more. So please no answers mentioning only one app if the solution does not solve the problem for others.

the pulseaudio app (gui and terminal) was already used. Alsamixer was also used. In both cases, adjusting the microphone level did not help. The auto adjust always happens when anyone speaks, does not even need to be someone speaking loud, they just need to speak and after a couple of seconds the mic level will start auto adjusting. I repeat, this is not a 1 app problem but several, so a common solution is better than a 1 for each app (Which we are talking about more than 50 apps).

ZannaLuis AlvaradoLuis Alvarado

10 Answers

For Skype:

Skype > Options > Sound devices
and Uncheck Allow skype to automatically adjust my mixer level

Zanna

Not sure if this applies to everyone, but if you use any kind of web conference / video chat service in Chrome / Chromium such as Google Hangouts, there's a good chance it uses the WebRTC protocol. Unfortunately the WebRTC implementation in Chromium comes with a handy “feature” called Automatic Gain Control that tends to screw with your microphone volume. Unless the web app itself gives you an option to disable it, there is otherwise no way turn it off, and Chrome developers don't want to add a global “off switch” for it.

What I ended up doing was to use @lelandbatey's solution. Since I was using PulseAudio, I used pacmd instead of amixer:

Note that 65535 corresponds to 100%, so 90000 is about 135%. The name of the device (alsa_input.???-?????.analog-stereo) should be substituted with whatever you find by running pacmd list-sources grep name::

Set your microphone to Unamplified 100% Try installing pulse audio volume control:

And then open: pavucontrol

BuZZ-dEE

I am still working on this annoying issue (An option should be included on the Input Devices tab to 'Force' the input volume to stay where the user wants to set it. This would apply for specific cases where the user knows what volume it needs for a particular app and the auto adjust features does not work correctly for it. Anyway, to set it to 'semi-manual' mode instead of auto adjust for Google Apps like Hangouts, created/edit the file options in:

and add the line:

or simply run the following line:

Save the file and close any Google related apps. The volume for the input device should stop auto adjusting. This works 50/50 this is why I am looking for a permanent solution.

Luis AlvaradoLuis Alvarado

This worked for us (we're not using Skype):

Jeremy Bicha

I got this problem with Skype, you have to disable the auto adjust mixer levels (maybe you have to check advanced settings or thing like that)

I had this problem, but with every type of video chat that I attempted to use on Xubuntu, everything from Google Hangouts to appr.tc would auto adjust my microphone volume. In particular, it seems to boost the volume if any voices can be heard in the background, as if to try to make the quietest voice be heard.

Anyway, my fix was to manually set my microphone volume with a command line directive, put into a while loop and running every tenth of a second. So, here's the shell oneliner that solves my problem:

On your computer to get it to work, you may need to change which device to adjust and which channels to change. To find that information, you may want to use Alsa mixer, accessible with alsamixer.

I fixed the issue on my machine by disabling any other mics on my desktop. I found if the camera mic picked up audio, it dropped the gain on the headset. I disabled the camera mic and the headset is steady now.

Not sure if it helps, but thought it worth mentioning.

The answer from this 'duplicate' question is for me the best, I let the credits to the person who answered

In the configuration file /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-input-internal-mic.conf (you might have to look for the correct file for your microphone), I changed the volume = part to 100 which is the percentage instead of merge

to

and after a sudo alsa force-reload, applications don't magically change the microphone volume anymore.

If this is a problem only with WebRTC in Chromium, disable WebRTC Echo Canceller by going to 'about:flags':

protected by Community♦Oct 4 '17 at 12:44

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