Google meet is messing up your microphone input levels? This post is a result of not finding any viable solution on any Google official support page. I want to explain to you my solution to stop having Google Meet changing the audio levels all the time.

Google Meet missing feature

Google Meet does not have any setting to set input levels for the microphone. It relies on macOS preferences. Unlike Zoom, which allows you to uncheck the option “Automatically adjust audio levels”, Google Meet automatically changes the audio gain whenever considers it’s too low.

My Use Case

I recently upgraded my setup to have a better microphone. I am using a USB-C Audio Interface (Audient EVO-4) to plug my microphone into the mac. If I let Google Meet raise the volume, it ends up introducing a lot of noise to the call. I found the perfect amount of gain for my current setup, and I don’t it do be adjusted automatically.

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Solution 1 — Use Safari

I found that this problem only happens when using Chrome. When using Google Meet in Safari the volume does not change.

Using Safari has a couple of fewer features compared to using Google Chrome. For example, the blurred or custom backgrounds. If you don’t mind losing these features, this is the easiest way to solve the problem.

Solution 2 — Aggregated Device

Another way to solve this issue is by creating an Aggregated Device. You can create an Aggregated device using the app Audio Midi Setup. In Audio Midi Setup, you add an aggregated device, and you select your microphone. You can rename the device to make it clear. In my case, I used (EVO4 - Blocked Input). When you go back to Google Meet, you choose the new device as the microphone.

The aggregated device does not have either input controls or output controls. In my case, I use the EVO4 for Output as well to monitor my audio. The problem with that is I cannot control the volume up/down from my mac keyboard. That’s not a big problem after all, as I can adjust it with the hardware wheel in the EVO-4.

If you don’t want to monitor your audio, you can use your headphones as the output device in Google Meet, and that would work perfectly.

I hope Google solves this problem

I’d love to take down this article because Google solved the problem in their software, but meanwhile, I hope this can help you. If you searched for it, most probably it’s annoying you as much as it was annoying me.