USB Microphone volume is too low! Boost it with VoiceMeeter Banana..

[Snacko]

I just wanted to share this...

I have had problems for a long time with Voice Recognition and Voice Attack.  Confidence level varied a lot, and sometimes things worked find and other times nothing worked at all.

Most of the time I have found that it is the microphone setup.  Sometimes it was the voice recognition, but I think I have solved that by starting over with it.  Going into Windows Speech Recognition and starting a new profile for the recognition engine in Windows.  And then training my voice..

I have a Rift mic, and a USB Headset mic.  So, if I tell VA to use a the default Recording device, then I need to change the default device whenever I change from the USB Headset to the Rift.  Or, if I tell VA and other apps, specifically which device to use, then I need to change that every time.

This is all very annoying..  And I forget most of the time and struggle with low recognition because I haven't switch something.

The low confidence problem has been plaguing me for a long time too.  I thought My recognition wasn't good.  But after looking at my levels, I'm surprised I sometimes ever got good confidence levels.  Then I saw this article.  It says that Microsoft has porked every USB Mic.  I believe it, because I used to set my mic volume to 80 at the highest in the past.  Now even at 100, it's outputting about 5-10%!!  So... I need a new mic, or I need to boost this one.

So, I was already using VoiceMeeter Banana, a virtual mixer, to sends audio to my speakers, and different sound files to my game chair shakers.  So, I came with this solution.  I have one Hotkey to toggle the Mic input into VoiceMeeter Banana, and then I set it's 1 Virtual Output Device as my Default Mic Device.  And I made a macro button that mutes the output of the mic I am not using.

And, you can see that I Boosted my USB Headset, which now has a much higher Output from VoiceMeeter Virtual Output 'B1'.

Here's a diagram of what I did.  I made some changes after this image was created.  I added mute to the mic I was not using.  And I change the Hotkey, because Shift+Esc will also close a window.. 

And, VoiceMeeter Banana is FREE.  But if you find it useful, give the guys a donation. 

Here's what My code looks like now with the added mute toggle.  1 means enable, 0 means disable.

Button clicked on.
Strip[0].B1 = 1
Strip[0].mute = 0
Strip[1].B1 = 0
Strip[1].mute = 1

Button clicked off.
Strip[0].B1 = 0
Strip[0].mute = 1
Strip[1].B1 = 1
Strip[1].mute = 0