Omnidirectional Mic and voice dropoffs

[hueffmea]

I'm using Audacity to record game sessions. All of us are within 4 ft of the mic and sometimes it picks us up nicely and sometimes it doesn't.
There is no ambiant noise in the room but sometimes even while a person is talking the volume suddenly sharply drops.

So I'm listening to the playback and I hear someone talking. They are coming out nice and clear, then in the middle of the sentence it gets quite.
Also I noticed short sentences with pauses on either end barely come out at all.

I've used the leveler to try and bring the lows up and the highs down, but I can't seem to get a good balance.

Can you suggest anything?

[kozikowski]

This is the symptom of a computer trying to "auto level set" your show because it thinks you're making a Skype telephone call and not a theatrical production. Many times that's something you can turn off in Windows sound managers or Control Panel.

I know we answered this before and I'm searching for the posting...

Koz

[kozikowski]

OK, maybe we didn't answer it before. Here's a posting about how to turn it off in Skype...

http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=57766

Sometimes the drivers for the sound card will do this, too.

Koz