Connecting a microphone

Let's go ahead and plug-in our USB microphone and make sure that it's set up on our computer properly. Now, obviously you're not going to have the exact same microphone that I do, so your steps may be a little bit different than exactly what I see on screen, but the general process should basically be the same. The first thing you want to do is plug in your USB microphone. When your microphone is plugged in, Windows should popup and let you know that it's automatically trying to install the Driver Software for your microphone.

You'll see a little status window down here in the lower-right. You can click on that window to see some information about your microphone. In this case, Windows has found my microphone, identified it, and downloaded the appropriate software automatically for me. I can then go ahead and click the Close button and my microphone has been set up on my PC for me. Let's go ahead and go into our Control Panel and check and see that our microphone is really selected there. So in our Control Panel, I'm in the Icon view, I'll go ahead down and select Sound, and click on the tab for Recordings.

Now, I have two Microphone options; the one that is checked is my Yeti Stereo Microphone, which is the one that I want to have. If your USB microphone is not automatically selected with the checkbox next to it, go ahead and select it and then click Apply, and then OK. Now we know that our microphone is properly connected to our computer and we're getting sound into our computer. You may need to adjust the Gain settings on your mic. For my mic, I've got the Gain settings set to the midpoint on the back of the microphone.

Now, of course headset mics are not necessarily going to have this setting, but if you've got a desktop mic, that's a pretty good place to start. When we go into starting to do our recordings, we'll look at making sure that our settings are correct by doing some sound tests inside of Camtasia. For right now, we're set up to where we need to be.