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Comment by shaan7 | Hacker News Reader

Yup. The thing I absolutely love about Zoom is how easy it is to switch between mics and output device. Every other conferencing tool needs you to go to Settings > Voice and then change it. With Zoom, just click the arrow next to the mute button, select device and voila!

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I can't stand this feature, because it overrides my OS-level choice. If I select my headset as the microphone to use, then I expect it to be used. But Zoom might use a different microphone, so I need to change it there as well.

In addition, even if I select "System default microphone", that doesn't always work correctly. As far as I can tell, that option doesn't mean to attach to the default source. Instead, it means to attach to the same source that is currently bound to the default source. If I change the default source later, Zoom doesn't get moved along with it.

Some recent update of zoom and or pipewire made this absolutely broken. I need to manually go and change my Bluetooth headset source from A2DP to HSP before opening zoom or it crashes and I can't select any microphone.

It's insanely annoying. Zoom has caused more crashes ob my machine than any other piece of software.

True. I keep it at "System default microphone" but its not 100% reliable. BUT, that is also the case with every other conferencing tool as well (Meet, Teams etc). At least in Zoom its easier to quickly override it when things go south.

Same issues here. I don’t care that my dock has a mic port that Zoom and Teams think they should automatically use. Use the damn system setting for my hardwired headset mic.

Yeah the dock thing sucks. My workaround is to permanently disable the dock (and the webcam's) mic device.

My wife had a mixer attached to her Mac where she plugged in her phone for music and her wireless mic when she was teaching online dance classes during the height of Covid. She absolutely needed to be able to switch to the mixer which registers as a sound input device separate from system settings when she was doing anything else.

Really don’t know why this setting isn’t always up front and center just like the mute button. With just the default audio interface i have a few options and a lot of us have more than just the default interface.

While we are at it why can’t I control what audio interfaces are available to a specific program on a program by program basis? No, I will never want to use Steam Streaming Audio or my Oculus quest mic on a webex/zoom. Ever.

Pretty sure Jitsi lets you do this as well.

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