Before a video call or recording

The worst moment to find the wrong microphone is when the interview starts. Five minutes beforehand, these tools check that the camera works, that people will hear you clearly, and that sharing your screen goes as planned. They run in your browser, and the picture and sound are shown on the page only: nothing is saved or uploaded.

1. Check the camera and microphone

Open Camera & Microphone Test. Choose a Camera and a Microphone, or No camera / No microphone to test one, and press Start. The browser asks permission. The names of every device appear in the menus once you’ve allowed it, so choose the headset or webcam you mean to use, not the laptop’s built-in one, and press Start again to switch.

Under the picture you see its size and frames a second. A low frame rate in a dim room is common, so turn on a light in front of you rather than behind. The level meter shows the microphone in dBFS: 0 is the loudest it can send, and around −20 is a comfortable speaking level. Say a sentence and watch it. If it never moves, you have the wrong microphone or it is muted.

Record 5 seconds and play back is the real test: it plays back what others will hear. Use headphones, or the speakers feed back into the microphone. Press Stop when you’re done, which releases the devices, so the indicator light goes out.

Call programs often add their own echo cancelling and noise reduction on top, and the test page turns these off so you hear the microphone as it is. Check the call program’s own settings too.

2. Listen to the room

Open Sound Level Meter and press Start measuring. Stay quiet and watch the figure: a fan, a fridge or traffic you’ve stopped noticing shows up here. Switch the fan off, close the window, and watch it drop. Then speak at your normal volume: the gap between the quiet room and your voice is what makes you easy to understand.

The big number is an estimate in dB(A), the smaller one is the level in dBFS. Without a reference meter the dB(A) figure is a rough guess, as phones and laptops differ by 10 dB or more. Use it to compare one room or moment with another, not as a measure for hearing safety or noise limits at work. Highest keeps the loudest reading since you started, which finds a sudden noise; Reset highest clears it.

3. Rehearse a screen share or recording

If you’ll share your screen or record a talk, try it first in Screen Recorder. Tick Record my microphone for your voice, and Record the sound of the tab or screen if you’ll play sound; the second is available only for a tab in Chrome and Edge, or the whole screen on Windows. Press Start recording, choose the window or tab to share, speak for ten seconds, and Stop. The recording plays below, so you see exactly what the audience sees: notifications, a cluttered desktop, the wrong window, a name in a browser tab.

On a Mac, the browser needs Screen Recording permission in System Settings › Privacy & Security the first time, and you may need to restart the browser afterwards, which is far better found out now. Close what you don’t want seen, switch notifications off, and share one window rather than the whole screen where you can.

If it’s your actual recording, Save the video keeps it, or As a GIF makes a short looping clip. For editing and sharing it, see Recording a how-to video.