Learning Challenge - Day 4

Friday morning I woke up early to take advantage of some quiet time to get a little work done. I got myself set up to make updates to a self-paced web-based training (WBT) I finished just before my maternity leave. I carefully marked the script, opened up Captivate and dug out my mic. I had captured some scratch audio for an alpha version of another WBT a few weeks back, so I didn't bother to test the quality of my audio.

The first sentance of the first slide had to be updated with the year. I chose to re-record the whole first sentance. I selected the audio and hit record to record right over. When I played it back my heart sank. When did my office become a wind tunnel? I looked around... nothing could be creating that noise. In fact, we have two less computers in the office since the WBT had been created. I looked at my mic... could it be time to replace my trusty mic? It had been free with a webcam after all. How long could I possibly expect it to perform with decent quality?

Why does this stuff always happen on my day off?

I thought again. What was different from last year? I turned to Google, thinking... it's this darn Vista!! Sure enough, I found several articles to support my theory. Vista's automatic audio settings are set pretty low. I adjusted mine following this demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w35awlUQegs

Still windy. I pinged two of my co-workers to ask if they had similar issues. Tim, my wonderful, always responsive, very helpful co-worker of nearly 6 years came to my rescue, yet again. We ran through everything... I tried different programs to test my audio, no dice. Finally he said, "I'm sure you've done this, but did you check to see if your external mic was selected in Captivate?" Sure enough, that was the issue. Apparently, Vista uses the internal mic as default.

So, my lesson, besides having more evidence that Vista is poop:

I am not immune to user-error.

and/or

Always check the most obvious solution.

*hides face in shame*