As some of you may know, I have had some problems with skype lately. I have a microphone that works perfectly, and two different sound cards which both pick up the microphone quite well. However, in Skype in Windows, I was getting extremely low mic volume, so calls were difficult to hear for the person on the other end of the line. Skype offers very few hardware options, and I quickly exhausted all of the configuration optiions I could make within the software.

I emailed technical support this last week, and they finally got back to me. It did take about five days, but their information was surprisingly relevant. I would have guessed what I received might have been a common email they send out, but I realized the content was not in the knowledge base, so it looks like someone actually took some time to research this for me. Which is great, considering I'm paying nothing to use Skype. The technical support person directed me to an XML file in my homedir, and I had to add a few custom tags to the XML document. After this, Skype printed out its setting for "MicVolume" into the XML file, and I was able to change this myself. I increased the microphone volume by five times; hopefully this will solve all of my problems.

All in all, this is a curious situation, it seems to me like this kind of thing should be editable from within the program. Either way, its working now and I'm happy.