Microphone Test — Check Your Mic and Input Level

Aim for the meter sitting around 40–70% while speaking normally, with peaks staying below the red. Recording quietly and turning it up afterwards raises the noise floor with the voice; recording into the red clips permanently and cannot be fixed later.

Either the wrong input is selected — laptops often default to a webcam microphone rather than a headset — or the OS has the input muted. The device list appears once permission is granted, so switch inputs there and the test restarts on the new one.

Browsers enable echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control by default for calls. They are helpful on a call and harmful when recording music or a podcast, since they duck steady sounds and pump the gain. The panel reports which are active on your stream.

48 kHz is the native rate of nearly all modern audio hardware and the default across WebRTC. A 44.1 kHz request is usually resampled rather than honoured, so recording at 48 kHz and converting once at the end avoids a needless resample.