The slight touch of Spring that Vermonters experienced this weekend inspired me to get out and take a few nice long hikes with my new puppy and I was reminded of what a beautiful area I live in and how the move from Boston was worth it.
That said, there are a lot of people that I left behind and one way I like to keep in touch with them is through the video chat function in iChat. For anyone who’s experienced the ease of video chatting through iChat you know that it’s clean, easy and has pretty darn good resolution if you’re using a built-in iSight and have a speedy internet connection.
The one complaint that I have is that on some machines the internal speakers rarely get loud enough for the conversation to be clearly heard. While that hasn’t been a problem with my 2.66Ghz MacBook Pro, it was a problem with my last MacBook and with my old iBook.
The easy answer is to use a set of headphones, which is all well and good, but then I thought of my Sound panel in System Preferences and wondered if it could help me. Sure enough, by going to the “Input” tab and pumping my internal microphone’s volume up, the person on the other end could hear me better. They did the same thing on their end and, voila, I could hear them better!
For the most part this has worked really well for me. The only catch is that by turning the input level up on an internal microphone it can occasionally lead to issues with feedback if it’s turned up too high. I didn’t find that to be an issue on the iBook or MacBook, but on my MacBook Pro, cranking the internal mic up full blast leads to a not-so-lovely high-pitched squeal. If that’s the case on your end, just turn the volume back down a bit until you find a level that works for you!