Detecting if the microphone is on

audio, microphone, windows

Solution

No, microphones don't tell you whether they're ‘on’ or that a particular sound channel is connected to a microphone device. The best you can do is to read audio data from the input channel you suspect to be a microphone (eg. the Windows default input device/channel), and see if there's any signal on it.

To do that you'd have to remove any DC offset and look for any signal above a reasonable noise floor. (Be generous: many cheap audio input devices are quite noisy even when there is no signal coming in. A mid-band filter/FFT would also be useful to detect only signals in the mid-range of a voice and not low-frequency hum and transient clicks.)

Problem

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