(upbeat music)
- Do you use Zoom to record your calls?
Do you create a podcast that is powered by Zoom?
Are you looking for great audio quality?
Do you want to make everything top-notch
on your online web meetings?
If the answer is yes to any of those questions,
you'll want to keep watching now,
because I'm going to hop into,
well, probably the most popular piece
of online conferencing software for the web.
It's just insane, so easy to use,
and, well, mainly it's based around faces appearing.
But of course, we really like things to sound good,
particularly if we're recording a podcast,
or if we're doing some kind of training
that means the audio quality needs to be top-notch.
So let me take you into Zoom for a couple of minutes
and show you a few of the settings,
and how you can optimize this software
to get the best quality audio,
then after that maybe we'll have a chat too.
Isabella, who's standing by and drinking cups of tea,
and we'll find out how she uses Zoom
and any tips she may have.
So, first of all, before you even create
a new meeting when you're in the Zoom app,
usually you'll have this opportunity here in the top right
to click the cog and go into the settings.
And you'll see there are all kinds of different settings
that you can choose,
but mainly you'll want to focus on the audio settings,
which are the second settings down on the screen, okay?
So audio settings are exactly where you want to go.
This is just mainly the general stuff is,
just how a meeting gets started,
and all that kind of stuff,
you've got video settings as well,
and all kinds of other stuff.
Maybe recording is relevant,
so we'll take a look in there as well.
But click into the audio,
it's the one with the headphone icon next to it.
Now, first of all,
you will see a bunch of different settings,
I've got them all set up optimally,
because I do a lot of training as it happens on Zoom
with universities, educational establishments
around the world, and their preferred method usually
is to use a Zoom call.
And usually it's over multiple days,
and they're long calls,
so I wanna get this absolutely tip-top.
So the first thing I do is I set up the speaker.
And this is pretty straightforward,
this will usually be your audio interface
or your sound device that you're using the play audio
so you can hear it, okay?
It's best to have the speaker and the microphone
a part of the same audio interface.
It gets confusing for instance
if you choose something different
for the speaker and the microphone,
you can have latency echo, and that's a problem.
So, for me right here in this example
I'm using the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2,
it's a really good solid audio interface, I recommend it,
and you can see it selected there.
I could choose something else,
I've got loads of stuff here,
I've got Rodes, I've got LG, all of that,
but if I start doing that,
it's gonna mess things up.
Output volume have that nice loud,
if you find that the audio is too loud
coming at you from Zoom and distorting,
just turn this volume control down,
it's as simple as that.
And you can of course click test speaker,
and this should play a little ring tone sound.
If that plays a ringtone sound,
you will know that there is something there
and you're able to hear it, okay?
You can use a separate audio device
to play the ringtone simultaneously as well,
this will give you the opportunity
to choose a different audio device,
so I can choose my Rode.
I'm not sure if you could hear that ringtone,
because I have this fed directly to my headphones,
so it might not come out in this video,
but maybe you could hear it there.
So that's just an extra option
just to test the ringer, that's all.
And when you get incoming calls,
it'll come over the other audio device you select.
So far, not too many optimizations here,
just making sure we've got things set up.
We've got microphones, we can of course do a test.
Again, this is plugged into the Scarlett 2i2,
volume is in the middle.
Now, automatically adjust microphone volume
is usually selected by default in Zoom,
I highly recommend that you untick that,
I can't stress that enough.
In Zoom, under your microphone,
automatically adjust microphone volume,
I highly recommend you untick that.
Why is that?
Because if you have it ticked,
what Zoom is gonna do all the way through your call,
is try and turn your volume up and down
depending on how loud and quiet you are.
And if you're like leaning away from the mic or something,
or playing a soft piece of audio,
it's gonna turn you right up,
and then if you start shouting
or whatever it's gonna turn you down,
and it's just not optimal,
and that's not how things generally work in audio,
we don't turn up and down when things get quiet and loud,
it sounds very unnatural.
So untick automatically adjust microphone volume.
This one here, untick it,
set it yourself, look at the level meter, look at that.
When I'm talking you can see the blue line
gets to about three quarters of the way up,
that's enough, no more than that.
And don't make it too quiet,
so if it's like going to a quarter or around a half,
you're too quiet,
so set the volume yourself, you can test.
This is a quick test to make sure it's working,
hopefully it's working, let's find out.
Okay, I just put my headphones up to the mic
because I don't know if you're getting
the direct feed of my mic.
- We are. - You can be guaranteed
that it played me back and everything's perfect.
So, that is good.
So, we got our audio interfaces set up now,
we're all good, but it doesn't stop there,
we're just getting started because of course
Zoom audio's gonna sound rubbish
unless you follow the rest of my steps.
First of all, suppressed background noise,
usually this is set to auto,
letting Zoom decide what to do depending on
what your environments sound like.
I cannot stress this enough, switch it to low,
switch it to the lowest possible,
do not leave it on auto,
do not put medium, do not put high, set it too low.
Now, I wish (chuckles), dare I say as an audio pro,
I wish Zoom actually had an option
that said, "Switch this option off," yeah?
As an audio professional,
I haven't got noise on my line,
I can't hear any hiss or any problems on my mic.
So, as someone who knows a little bit about audio,
I'd love the opportunity Zoom if you're listening,
to have an off setting under here.
But in lieu of an off setting, click low.
Then we get onto the really good stuff,
this is music and professional audio,
this is where I live in this app.
So, show in meeting option to enable original sound,
you want to have this ticked.
And what it's going to do,
I'm not going to start a Zoom meeting now,
but I'm going to describe it to you.
Whenever you start a meeting,
you'll get a green icon at the top left
that says original sound,
whenever you start a meeting
you only need to click original sound,
and what you'll do is you'll stop that
over internet compressed, horrible low bit rate audio,
and you'll get pretty much studio quality sound.
So that's the most important thing you can do
to get an upgraded sound.
You will need a good internet connection by the way,
but most internet connections now
can handle really good quality sound.
So, show in meeting option to enable original sound,
and when you're in a meeting,
at the top left you'll get a green button,
click that to enable original sound.
And then enable these three options
when original sound is on.
High fidelity music mode,
you want to tick this obviously,
because it will give you the highest bit rate on your audio
and a really good quality.
Echo cancellation, you want to untick that,
you don't want to have echo cancellation ticked.
And the reason for this is if you do,
it's gonna do more noise suppression,
and it's gonna interfere and mess about with your audio,
and hopefully you already got it sounding how you want,
so don't let Zoom play with it, untick it.
And stereo audio, again Zoom by default,
as it's a conferencing piece of software,
it works in mono, generally it's mono.
But for us audio pros who are here to learn good stuff,
we want stereo audio,
and it's very important if you're teaching audio
or music production or anything like that, so tick that.
Then you've got ringtones,
don't worry about that,
it's just ringtone when a call comes in.
Automatically join audio by computer
when joining a meeting, tick it,
otherwise you get this prompt as you join a meeting,
and you have to click a button and it's just fiddly,
so tick that.
Me and my microphone when joining a meeting
I have that unticked,
'cause usually I'm the host of a meeting,
so I would untick that,
so on the moment I join a meeting,
and I don't talk all muted,
and people say, "You're on mute,"
so I have that unticked for personal preference.
Press and hold space to temporarily unmute yourself.
Yeah, I have that, that's a good shortcut.
And sync buttons on headset.
So, if you have a headset plugged into Zoom,
it'll sync what you do on your headset as well.
It's also advanced here, whoa.
So we've got signal processing
by Windows audio device drivers,
I have that off, I don't want Windows messing with my audio.
And echo cancellation again, auto in the advanced mode,
again, I wish there was an off,
definitely don't have aggressive selected.
And that Isabella is how you set up Zoom
for premium quality audio.
Anything you want to add or is that it?
- I do, there are a couple of things
that I think are important to say.
So first of all, Zoom is not the optimum place
to record your high quality audio
and video content. - (indistinct) yes.
- It is designed as a call handling place
where you can meet with people.
It's not really, its purpose has never been
to record high quality audio and video.
If you are looking for high quality recordings,
then our recommended place
would be something like Riverside.fm.
They do record high quality audio and video,
and what they do is they record it at source,
which means that the audio and video is recorded
at the local place of your guests
rather than on your end.
So, if there are internet disruptions,
you won't get those annoying, - The other side.
- dips in the quality throughout,
or the voice cutting out and things like that,
you will get high quality audio.
It does give you option to get the audio
as separate tracks for each guests.
This is very important because your audio producer
can then apply individual settings
to the audio environment you or your guests are at.
They can also take out little pieces of audio
where maybe somebody coughs in the background,
and you are just saying something so important,
that the cough is just muting that.
So, just make sure to use the tool
that is appropriate for the purpose.
- I dare and say in the future
we can all be using Adobe's Project Shasta,
they'll probably be renamed by the time it's public
kind of software in the web browser.
But I think actually what we're also learning
is web browser recordings are the way it's going.
So, you'll just be logging into a webpage,
sharing that URL with your guests,
your guest will be signing in,
the artificial intelligence
will tell you whether you sound good or not
and give you tips to improve, and away you go.
So, technology is really improving
but Zoom is still mighty popular.
- It is mighty popular.
If you have to use Zoom that's fine,
there are ways to make it sound better.
Couple of things that you can tell your guests,
first of all make sure they wear headphones,
make sure you wear
headphones too. - Yeah, headset.
- This is absolutely essential
as it will stop the feedback loop of audio
going back in and distorting your audio
and making it absolutely horrendous.
Make sure you get as good of a microphone as you can.
And if you are using you Zoom to record your guests,
consider recording your own audio outside of Zoom,
because you will get a better quality that way,
as Zoom will process it
and make it sound kind of coal like,
and you can record your audio at source
at a far better quality.
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