Troubleshooting Ventrilo

UDATE 3: I've expanded my Ventrilo troubleshooting section at Home Tech Lab. You should check it out, it might be easier to read than this older article.

Recently, a member of my PvP team (which I've recently started to call Team: Unstoppable) purchased a new headset so that he can communicate with us on our private Ventrilo server. He wasn't able to get it working, despite my attempts to guide him through checking everything. I've helped many people troubleshoot their Ventrilo settings when they first try to get it working, so I thought it would be useful to spell out the step-by-step troubleshooting routine that I usually use when walking someone through this. Note that this guide is intended for Windows XP. I have no intention of purchasing Vista any time soon.

The very first step is to plug in the mic. If it's just a microphone, you plug it into the microphone jack on your PC. If it's a headset combo with both a headphone plug and a mic plug, then you should plug them each into the proper jacks on your PC... (Unless your computer is one of those that disables the output to your speakers when you plug in headphones...)

The next step is to make sure that your computer is actually listening to the microphone. In Windows XP, your soundcard is capable of recording audio from one of many sources - but only ONE source at a time. To make sure that your soundcard is receiving input from your Microphone...

1) Double click on the speaker icon in your tray, down on the right next to the clock.

2) When the Volume Control window comes up, click on Options, and then Properties.

3) When the properties window comes up, pay attention to the name listed in the Mixer device: dropdown box. There -should- be only one name in the dropdown box... It should be the name of your soundcard. Take note of this, you may need this later for troubleshooting. If is more than one name in the dropdown box, make note of that too, as you make need to try different settings here to find your true microphone input.

4) There are radio buttons (the round buttons) next to the words Playback and Recording. Press the radio button for Recording.

5) In the box below, you should see checkmarks for all of the devices that your soundcard can receive audio input from. Make sure that the checkmark for Microphone is checked. You might also see something called "Stereo Mix"(or similar). I recommend you also hit the checkmark for Stereo Mix, since you can use that later to do some fun things with Ventrilo.

6) Click OK when the check marks are set. You should see the Volume Control window get replaced with the Recording control, and you should see slider controls for at least Microphone (and hopefully Stereo Mix).

7) Set the slider control for the Microphone to about halfway to start with. You should adjust this slider later if you need to make your microphone more or less powerful.

Now, leave that window open and start up Ventrilo.

8) in Ventrilo, click Setup. This will open the settings window. It doesn't matter if you're connected to a server or not.

9) On the first tab, at the top right, there is a dropdown box for Input Device, and another one for Output Device. You need to make sure the Input Device dropdown box is set to the same soundcard name as you saw in the properties window in step 3.

10) Now, click the Monitor button to start the monitor tool. If everthing is configured correctly by this point, you should see some numbers in the box in the middle of the settings window. These numbers represent the volume leven that the microphone is picking up. Normal numbers should be somewhere between 2 and 10 when you're not talking, and somewhere between 10 and 100 when speaking. If you're getting numbers like these, then your microphone is working properly.

From here, you should setup either Push-to-talk or voice activation levels, and click OK. Your Ventrilo should now be ready to use.

UPDATE: I've written a followup article on this, which you can find HERE!

UPDATE 2: I've opened a new website that focuses on issues like this. Home Tech Lab is a resource for troubleshooting technical issues in the home computer.