Fixing my mic for calls
A friend told me I was too loud on Discord and that the ends of my sentences got cut off. My mic goes through DeepFilterNet (DFN) in a PipeWire filter-chain and then through EasyEffects, so I looked into the chain to find the source of the issues.
Preparation
I started by listening in realtime to changes I made, but I noticed I couldn’t really focus on listening while I was also speaking. So instead of talking into the mic, I recorded a raw take once and ran it through the chain offline. This way I could change one thing and listen again.
Source of clipping
Changing settings in EasyEffects changed nothing to the clipping. DeepFilterNet cuts off quiet speech as noise, so I added a gain boost in front of it. DeepFilterNet also adds gain of its own. Together with the rest of my chain, that was the “too loud” and maybe the cut-off ends as well. So I added a trim right after DFN that takes that gain back out.
Tuning the EQ
The gate turned out to be redundant, DFN already handles the noise, and the compressor did nothing but add latency. The EQ was what made my voice boom. I threw out the gate and the compressor and kept a high-pass at 80 Hz and a bit of low end.
Discord
On the Discord side: input sensitivity on manual, noise suppression and automatic gain control off. The chain does that already.