Hey all,
I've searched around a bit in similar threads and googled it, but i could only find a few cases that somewhat apply. Terribly sorry if i am repeating an asked question. I am pretty good at learning as i go and i have a basic knowledge of my computer and how to follow directions.
COMP:
Win XP Home edition
Service Pack 2
mobile AMD Athalon XP-M 1900+ 1.60GHz, 224 MB RAM
I use Winamp as my default media player, just so you know.
(i don't know what else you *really* would like to know, but i figure this is an acceptable start of what i am running, even though it is definately not all you will want to know. Please, ask me of any other specs that you need to know.)
I have recently figured that i might as well buy a mic to enhance my IMing. I bought a rather cheap but useful comp mic from radioshak, product number 33-3026 (it has no name that i have been able to find). I tried to set it up and everything last night to no avail.
Aparently, since there are no instructions online or on the back of the little package or *anything* that would suggest that there is something more to do than to plug it into the back of the comp (i am assuming i am putting it in the right spot in the sound card: right next to where the speakers are--in the plug that has a little microphone picture. You never know with these windows artists...
).
I tried that and i tried to test it with my MSN Messenger 7.0 but of course, i doubted that it would work (which it didn't). A number of things could have gone wrong there so i searched for a more reliable test, and that brought me to "sound and audio devices" in the control panel.
Now, lets see what i did.... I quickly searched through the dialog box and found in the "Voice" tab that there was a nice little microphone picture and a nice little "test hardware" button. This seemed like the right spot to test out a mic right? So, i hit that and went through the wizard to the point where it said to say the words and see if it got anything. It didn't so i decided that the test didn't work and to try and fiddle around.
So, I left the "Volume", "Hardware", and "Sounds" tabs alone after i took a quick glance around there and went to the "Audio" tab and back to the "Voice" tab. I changed the scrolldown textboxes to all different combinations and tested it each time.
Nothing worked so i went onto the IRC and talked to my faithful dev team at Daimonin (not only are they good at games, but they are a fairly nice tech support if you need them :P). With them, i found a faster test for my mic: start->programs->accessories->entertainment->sound recorder. When i opened that and hit record, it would always say "another application is recording audio... blah blah". We couldn't stop if from saying this so i gave up for the night and concluded that i'd call radioshack in the morning :P.
Sometime that night (i'm not sure when....) i had gone and tried to test the mic the old way in sound and audio devices, but whenever i hit "test hardware" it would start preparing for a sec and then say "no audio device". I didn't quite know what this meant so i retried a bit and went to sleep.
Today is the next day and i still havn't called radioshack, but ran into a WORSE problem. No sound. Well, i did have some sound though: i had diablo 2 sound and also winamp sound. It gets a bit blurry around here because i am not sure when exactly it stopped giving sound out since winamp was up pretty loud. I am not sure if i have diablo 2 sound anymore, but i don't have any Windows sounds going on or any MSN Messenger sounds.
I again tried to fix this. I went to the handy-dandy sound and audio devices icon and immediately saw the "No audio device" message in the "volume" tab. I still didn't connect the two (from 2 paragraphs back) though... so i continued to just IM without sound. Now my IM buddy is gone so i tried to fix the problem and it clicked.....
So now i know that it was *probably* broken since last night, but yet diablo 2 played this morning and winamp still plays. My mic still doesn't work, and the only things that i messed with was sound and audio devices. So, the problem *must* be there somewhere, i just can't find it. I've googled for a while and searched forums, but i have only found one forum where winamp still works but not any other sounds... and that didn't work for me.
I figure you guys might as well know the whole story, so there it is. I am asking for help on 1) how to get my audio back up and 2) how to make this mic work. If you need any more specs from me just ask what you want, specifically. I thank you for reading this huge post, and i hope that i have helped with my "big picture". I am going to laugh if someone has a direct, 1-5 step way of fixing this, but that'd be great....
Anyways :P
Cheers,
Unislash