Ref. subject. What new sorcery is this? I may be mistaken since it’s been a while but in the past I’m pretty sure I used to be able to use vPilot through text and receive audio without a mic or a headset connected to the PC at all. I think I would still get the warning that:
[12:41:21] No microphone device detected! You will not be able to communicate on voice until you plug in a microphone device and restart vPilot.
But I was able to connect to the voice server and receive audio.
Then I was away from VATSIM and vPilot for a year or so and now that I’m back I realized vPilot can receive ATC audio ONLY when a mic has been connected to the PC. It doesn’t matter which output device I’m using. Everything else works perfectly fine, vPilot settings and Windows settings and audio drivers included.
The only way to receive audio is to first connect a USB headset to the PC, then launch vPilot, then get the log line that I was connected to voice server and then everything works OK. Without a mic it won’t connect to the voice server at all.
Since I don’t really want to use a mic or even a headset, I’ll probably end up installing some virtual input device and fool vPilot into thinking a mic is plugged in.
And I guess the only workaround is to either connect a physical mic/headset after all (and just leave it aside), or better yet create a virtual one, or use swift which doesn’t seem to have such a restriction (it works perfectly well without any input device).