I run skype though my Apple MBP – and use the popular “Call Recorder” software to capture my “interviews” or what I call “chinwags”. One annoyance to me was how quiet I seemed on the chinwag compared with my interviewees. This was despite using a professional podcasters microphone from Samson. Anyway, one week whilst chinwagging with Simon Seagrave (of TechHead fame) – Simon pointed out that sometime in Windows, it “helps” you by reducing the sound level on the mic to stop a booming affect. Sure enough, when I opened the System Preferences and Sounds – as we talked I could see the recording level down…!

Intially, I thought I would be able to stop this using the “Sound” option perferrences – but it seems like my flavour of MAC OS X doesn’t have this option, but others do…

It seems like Windows has a similar option – but its name and location varies from one version of Windows to another…

It turned out the culprit was Skype which has “Automatic Audio Gain” feature – which lowers level of the microphone in a call. It also transpires that in previous version of Skype on the Mac,  you had the ability to switch off this feature – in the new versions the GUI option to do this has been “depreciated”. Anyway, after some concerted google-wacking I found this blog post:

http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/?p=609

This blogpost explain how you could edit Skype XML file to switch the darn feature off…

Thank you, Bart!

Note, if you are on Windows – you would go to: Tools -> Options -> Audio Setting and uncheck “let the skype adjust my audio settings”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.