Mac Mini microphone hack
The usual mic used in PC’s and headset-mic combos won’t work with the mac mini–the mac mini mic input requires line level input, meaning the mic needs to be powered. The usual mic input for PCs are mic level input (about 1 millivolt, the mic doesn’t need to be powered). Bottom line is, if you have an existing mic which has worked with your PC, chances are it won’t work on the mac mini.
There are lots of solutions for this problem, just google the term “mac mini mic” and I’m sure you won’t run out of options–there are USB mics, and for sure you will run into the iMic from Griffin; but this guide is not about the iMic, I wasn’t inclined to buy a condenser mic or the iMic simply because I use the mic on the mini just on ocassions.
As you can see from the picture above, there is my old Sony ,portable cassette recorder, it has a pretty good mic so I thought I’d give that a try—in case you are wondering, the model of this old voice recorder is TCM-150.
If you have an old voice recorder, or as one of my buddies called it–a dicta-phone–you can try to use that first on your mac mini before shelling out some money to buy a USB mic. You will also need a stereo mini-jack connector (I got mine from local hardware supply store which also sold audio peripherals, you can try going to an audio shop–just look for a mini-jack which has both male connectors at both ends). The basic idea is to plug one end of the mini-jack to the earphone socket of voice recorder, and then plug the other end of the mini-jack to mic socket of the mac mini.
The mic probably won’t be powered when in “play” mode, so you will have to press “record” for the mic to be activated–when I tried this procedure, I actually put the recorder in the “pause” position, but as long as the “record” button is depressed, the mic was still okay.
I tested the mic using Skype for mac–try calling the Skype test call to test your audio equipment.
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