Troubleshooting Recording Issues
Recording issues can occasionally occur due to a variety of reasons, including hardware limitations, permissions, or misconfigurations. This section aims to identify problems that may occur while using the desktop recording client, explain their causes, and provide helpful information to resolve them.
Microphone Input
Low Sound or Muted Sound in Recordings
Sometimes recordings have low or muted sound even though audio track data is present (confirmed by ffprobe). This commonly occurs in scenarios such as:
- Using the virtual Microsoft Teams Audio Device on macOS as a microphone input source (it gets installed with Teams on macOS)
- Using the built-in MacBook Pro Microphone on a powered MacBook laptop that’s connected to an external monitor and has the lid closed
- Using an external microphone device (e.g., HyperX SoloCast) that’s muted through its own hardware mute button
- Muting microphone devices through a keyboard mute key (e.g., Logitech keyboards)
To help users catch these issues, the recording client includes a continuous microphone input monitoring system (initial changelog, initial blog post).
How the Mic Check Works
The recording client measures incoming audio volume as a value between 0 and 1, where 0 is complete silence and 1 is the loudest possible input. This value is calculated using RMS (Root Mean Square), a standard audio measurement method that computes a single number representing overall loudness level.
The check operates in two modes:
Normal mode (5-second average checks): The recording client measures the average volume over a rolling 5-second window. If the average stays above the threshold (0.00002), everything continues normally with no warning shown.
Alert mode (instant checks): If a 5-second average check finds the volume below the threshold, the recording client immediately displays a warning (“Your microphone is muted or the volume is too low.”) and switches to checking the instant volume on every frame (about 15 times per second). As soon as any sound is detected above the threshold, the warning disappears and the system returns to normal 5-second average checks.
This approach catches situations where a microphone goes silent (muted, disconnected, Bluetooth dropout) without being overly sensitive to normal pauses in speech.
The Volume Threshold
The volume threshold is set to 0.00002 on the 0-1 RMS scale. This value was determined through 30+ tests across various audio input devices (built-in microphones, USB microphones, Bluetooth headsets) and device types (desktop, mobile, tablet). This threshold represents the closest value to true silence across all tested devices, meaning any real audio input will exceed it while a muted or disconnected microphone will not.
Changing the Threshold
If you’d like to change the threshold to use another value, you can do that by setting a custom value to the embed code option pipe-rmsthreshold.
Disabling the Mic Check
If you’d like to disable the microphone input warning, set the embed code option pipe-disableaudiowarningmsg to 1.
Hardware & permission problems
Red Microphone Icon Appears: No Input Devices Available
Cause: The onended event is triggered because the input device (microphone) is disconnected, and no other input devices are available.
This scenario might occur on systems without an integrated microphone, such as:
- Mac Minis (no built-in microphone).
- Windows PCs or laptops where all input devices have been disabled or removed.
When this happens, the red microphone icon will appear.
Red Microphone Icon Appears: Permissions Revoked
Cause: The onended event is fired when camera or microphone permissions are revoked during the recording process, regardless of the number of available devices.
If permissions are revoked while recording, the desktop recording client will indicate this by showing the red microphone icon.
Red Microphone Icon Appears: No Hardware Microphone Detected
Cause: This issue occurs when there is no hardware microphone available on the system. It can be differentiated from the other scenarios in which the red microphone icon appears by the fact that the message “Connect a microphone or camera with microphone to record audio or video” is visible.
Example:
- Windows PCs with no physical microphone connected or configured.
In such cases, the red microphone icon will appear in the desktop recording client’s interface as the system cannot detect an active audio input device.