Changing Microphone Inputs on a Chromebook

Chromebooks can be useful for recording audio content. Whether you are having a video chat over Hangouts, doing production music recording, or doing a voice-over screen recording with an app like desKap it can be important to have options to select where your audio is being captured from. Fortunately for us Chromebooks have a very simple interface for managing exactly that.

Audio Settings Menu

Open the audio settings menu.

First we need to get to the Audio Settings Menu. This is accessed by clicking on your system tray(1) and then clicking on the small arrow on the right side of the row where your volume is adjusted(2).

Inputs and Outputs

Input/Output and device selection.

Inside the audio settings menu you will notice two headings in blue(1): Output and Input. These distinguish between headphones/speakers(Output) and microphones/line-inputs. For the purposes of this article we will be focusing on the Input section.

You can see I have three devices listed. The first input(2) with the crazy technical name is my USB webcam's microphone. I use this for when I do Hangouts calls since it picks up audio very well at a distance. The second input(3) is the microphone built into my Chromebook. I use that if I am away from the office. And the last input(4) is my USB Blue microphone, which I use for recording my voice on tutorial videos.

So I have found it useful to have different microphones for different purposes. You can see which input is currently active  by the green circle with the check(5). You can select a different input by clicking on the one you want to be active. When you do you will see the check move next to the one you just selected.

And that's it. Chromebooks make it very simple to dance between the various audio inputs and outputs you may have connected.