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Is Google Hangouts telling you "Your microphone is not working or is hardware-muted!" before proceeding to mute you like an idiot at every client touchpoint? Don't worry, it's not you – it's Google.
In a desperate effort to fix my own "not working" or "hardware-muted" microphone on my Mac last week, I came across tens, if not hundreds, of ways to circumvent or rectify the situation. Unfortunately for many of those solutions, I had already verified that my mic was working (System Preferences > Sound > Input) and I wasn't ready to reinstall anything or switch browsers. I just wanted to use Google Hangouts, dammit!
Finally, I gave in and scrolled through a lengthy and passive-aggressive thread in a Hangouts Help Forum, where I discovered what seems like the best solution. Allow me to save you some time and walk you through how I manually reset the audio daemon on my computer (it's cool, I don't really know what that means either) to get my mic working again in Google Hangouts.
Please not that this fix is for Mac and that I can't guarantee it will work for everyone as there are so many different machines and operating systems out there. But, it did work for me and several others who were looking for answers in the Hangouts Help Forum. If you'd like to view the original thread, and Ashley Yen's answer that I adapted for this article, click here.
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