For example, if you are watching a YouTube video on your computer, how would you record the audio? You could try to place a microphone next to your speakers, but that’s not an ideal way to record that audio. So what does it do? Basically, it lets you record any sound that is playing on your computer. If you don’t have this option, it means your sound card doesn’t support the feature. Lastly, back on the Recording tab, you may notice an option called Stereo Mix. Here you can setup voice control for Windows, train the computer to understand your voice better and setup your microphone properly for speech recognition. If you go back to the Recording tab, select Microphone and click on Configure, the Speech Recognition dialog will appear. There are many other options, including DVD quality, which you can use if you have a high-quality microphone. By default, it’s set to 1 channel, 16 bit and 44100 Hz, which is CD quality.
On the Advanced tab, you can change the default format for the audio. On the Levels tab, you can adjust the sensitivity of the microphone depending on your needs. Click the Apply button and any sound picked up by your mic should play through your speakers in real time. If you have multiple playback devices, you can choose from the dropdown list. By default, it’s set to your default playback device, which will normally be your headphones or speakers.
Obviously, this will work much better if you are using headphones, so that the sound from the speakers doesn’t feed back into the microphone.Ĭheck the Listen to this device box and select the device you want to play the audio back through. So as you talk into the microphone, the sound will be played in real time to your speakers. This is a cool feature whereby you can play the sound that is being recorded by your microphone directly to your speakers. The more interesting feature is on the Listen tab. On the General tab, you get some basic information about the device and you can choose to disable it here if you like. If you select the microphone and click on Properties, you’ll be able to adjust quite a few settings.