A system level automatic gain control (“System AGC”) automatically initializes and controls analog microphone gain in an environment where multiple independent applications simultaneously receive an input from a single analog microphone or microphone array. In one embodiment, the System AGC also prevents those applications from acting to separately control the gain by intercepting external gain control commands and responding to the corresponding application with a corresponding digital gain applied to the input signal from the microphone. Consequently, the System AGC avoids problems relating to oscillations and instability in the microphone gain resulting from multiple applications trying to simultaneously control the gain while preventing each application from adversely affecting the quality of another application's audio capture signal. Further, in one embodiment, the System AGC also acts to maximize the signal to noise (SNR) ratio of the microphone without introducing clipping as a function of a sampled background environment.