Windows 11, external webcam plus a USB mic on an arm. Roughly one call in three starts with the webcam mic selected, usually after the machine has slept or the USB hub has re-enumerated. I have set the default in Sound settings and inside each app and it still flips. Has anyone actually stopped this happening, or do you disable the webcam mic entirely and give up having it as a backup?
Disable it in Device Manager. The webcam presents itself as two separate USB devices, a camera and an audio endpoint, and you can switch off the audio one while keeping the camera working perfectly. It stops being a candidate, which is more reliable than telling six applications to prefer something else. If you ever want it back it is two clicks.
Did exactly this eighteen months ago and the problem never came back. Camera unaffected. I have no idea why this is not the standard advice.
I would not disable it. Chase the actual cause, which in your description is almost certainly the hub - devices coming back in a different order after sleep is exactly the symptom. Plug the mic straight into the machine, leave the webcam on the hub, and you keep a spare mic for the day your good one dies mid-call, which happens.
I recorded a forty minute interview on the webcam mic without noticing, because the app had switched and I never look at the input meter once we start talking. Unusable, had to redo it, and the guest was very gracious about it. Now the first ten seconds of anything is me watching the meter move while I say something pointless.
Watching the meter is the only real defence, whatever else you configure. Software will always find a new way to pick the wrong device on the one call that matters.
Three of my four conferencing apps remember the device per meeting-join rather than globally, which is why the setting looks like it did not save. Joining once from a browser and once from the desktop app counts as two different memories in at least two of them.
@solder_sundays · 3mo ago
Worth knowing the platforms behave differently here. On my Mac the app-level choice sticks between sessions and the only time it moves is if the device is physically absent when the app launches. On Windows I hit exactly your problem until I stopped using an unpowered hub - the re-enumeration order after sleep was different each time and whichever audio device appeared first won. Powered hub plus a direct port for the mic fixed most of it before I disabled anything.
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