when there is a lot of background noise), they will talk louder into the mic, since doing that on a real phone will increase how loud the other party will perceive the user's voice to be. Sometimes, when the user finds the other party can't hear them talk (e.g.
I can't believe Skype never thought to include the option to set the gain manually. (edit: I was asked to provide a screenshot, but then the screenshot would be just all text anyway, so I'll show a bigger snippet of what the shared.xml file should look like here. If you keep the Sound preference pane open at all times while using Skype, you should be able to monitor whether the Input volume slider (representing the mic's gain) moves around automatically or not. I'm not sure if the newer versions of Skype has this feature, but I'm using Skype 2.8.0.866 on Mac OS X 10.6, and the way to stop AGC is as follows: Skype has got to introduce a GUI element to turn off the Automatic Gain Control (AGC) of the Mic on Mac OS X.
