Why your mic might look broken

Four common reasons, in order of frequency. Wrong input device: your laptop has multiple, and the OS picked the wrong one — switch in the dropdown above. Permission blocked: an earlier site denied mic access and the browser remembered. Open the lock icon in the address bar and re-grant. Hardware mute: many headsets have a physical switch that doesn't signal the OS — check the cable. Driver gone weird: rare, but reboot fixes it 90% of the time.

What we are actually measuring

We hook a MediaStream from your selected mic into a Web Audio AnalyserNode, sample the time-domain buffer 60 times a second, and convert peak amplitude to a 0–100 scale. The bar you see is real — no fake animation, no pretend-it-works. If the bar does not move, no audio is reaching the browser.

Pre-flight before any recording

Run this test before any meeting, podcast take, or screen recording with narration. The failure mode you want to avoid is: record 5 minutes of perfect content, realize the wrong mic was active, redo. Thirty seconds here saves that. If you record with Clipy, the mic selector is in the recording UI itself, but a quick browser test confirms the OS-level setup is sane.

Privacy

The audio never leaves your device. We analyze it locally to draw the meter and discard it instantly — there is no recording, no upload, no transcript. You can verify in the browser's network tab: zero requests during the test.