Things that I am thinking about or learning (either through reading or by school of hard knocks). These are my personal thoughts and not necessarily the positions or thoughts of any organization I am associated with.

1 minute read

Sometimes you think you are going crazy only to find out it is a software bug (or feature!).

I was trying to update the audio for a Powerpoint slide presentation. I set the record volume to the level I liked in OS X with the Sound Preference Panel. I also set up the nice USB microphone to be the source of the sound.

Then I selected Insert | Sound | Record to bring up the Microsoft Powerpoint 2008 widget to record the sound. I was not getting good sound levels. Eventually I left the Apple Sound Preference Panel displaying the sound level and discovered that when I hit the Record button, the sound level was lowered automatically. Once I figured it out, I was able to counter the behavior by revisiting the Sound Preference Panel after hitting record. Of course, it is hard to hit record, give the Sound Preference Panel focus, and read a slide’s script with out delay and at a level volume but it was good enough (or I was giving in).

I tried building an Automator workflow to do this and I could get it to record hitting the Record button but evidently Microsoft did not give them unique names so the recorded action would not active the record button. Had I been able to do that, there was an Apple insert for Automator to allow me to reset the audio level.

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