- The virtual cam option in Ecamm Live
lets you use all of your scenes, graphics, and overlays
and whatever else with Zoom.
But unfortunately it doesn't send an audio signal.
Now I must've been out of the loop on Loopback
because I've only recently discovered it
as an awesome tool for looping your audio back into Zoom.
(upbeat music)
So let's loop back around
and talk about what's so great about Loopback.
But first this is not a sponsored video,
I did purchase loopback at the full price
and unfortunately it's not free software,
I purchased it for,
I think a hundred dollars was the price at the time,
which can seem a little steep
because a hundred dollars definitely is not cheap.
However, if you're somebody who uses Zoom and Ecamm
and encounters this problem a lot
of needing to move your audio from Ecamm to Zoom,
that $100 can really be a lifesaver.
And I know for me, it really was
because I kept having this problem over and over again.
And fortunately, Loopback is not a subscription plan,
it's a single payment price situation.
So once you pay once, you just have the software forever.
And basically what Loopback does,
is it lets you route virtually
audio sources all within your computer.
So you can have an output going into any input,
you can mix and match things and merge things.
Basically anything you can think of
in terms of routing audio within your system, you can do.
Now it is for Mac only and when you install it,
it's going to ask you to do something
that feels a little bit strange at first
but I promise it's okay.
I didn't expect this
or know this when I first installed it a few months ago,
so I don't have footage of it,
but when you install loopback,
a thing's gonna pop up
that says you need to reboot your computer into safe mode
and it's gonna give you some very simple instructions
on some permissions that you need to grant for loopback.
This feels very shady at first.
You just download something from the internet
and now it's like, yeah, go into the route of your computer
and grant access to all this stuff.
But all that you're doing
is you're giving Loopback permission
to modify all the audio within your system.
It's not touching anything else.
And the instructions to do it
are very simple and very clear.
But if you've never done something like that before,
like I hadn't, it might feel a little bit strange
but I'm just reassuring you, it is okay
and you won't break anything.
And the reason you need to do that
is so that you do give loopback permission
to just take control of all the audio
or at least it has the ability to take control
because if you're not using it,
it can just disappear into the background
as much as you want and not even be used
but as soon as you need it, you can bring it up
and then explore the magic of loopback.
Now, I wasn't able to get around this for a while
by using the Rodecaster Pro as my main audio source
so that is where all my audio is going into.
And I was even having my system audio
run into the Rodecaster
and then routing it back into the system to use with Zoom.
And that helped me to get some audio from Ecamm into Zoom
but it still caused some problems
because routing the system audio, and then back into Zoom,
if people in the Zoom meeting needed to speak
and have their voices heard it just got a little confusing
and loopback makes things a little simpler.
So if you're trying to play Ecamm sound effects,
or you're trying to play a video file through Ecamm
or anything where you need to get the audio
from Ecamm into Zoom in a full mixed situation,
this is definitely the easiest way to do it.
So right here is my Ecamm Live and if I click on Output,
then I can see that the virtual cam is turned on.
But like I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
virtual cam only effects video not audio.
So here's Loopback, and what this does
is it lets you create a virtual audio device.
And this is pretty much what we're going to create.
So I'll walk you through step-by-step it can look as simple
or advanced as you want,
obviously, if you're looking at where is it this right here?
It looks a little funky,
it almost looks like you're doing some Blender animation
or some DaVinci Resolve editing,
but all we're gonna do, is create a new virtual device.
And this is the basic setup that you're gonna end up with
but before we jump into that,
I'm gonna change the name of this to Ecamm Virtual Audio
Exclamation point.
And so what we're looking at here
as we've got different audio sources
or we have the ability to add different audio sources,
we've got our output channels.
So where's that audio going?
And we also have the ability to monitor our audio
and you can just keep adding in new sources
and all kinds of new stuff.
This default pass through option,
we don't really need.
So I'm gonna click on it and delete it.
And now we have no audio sources.
So I'm gonna add in Ecamm Live not the Notes app.
I'm gonna add in Ecamm Live.
Remember when I said you can do anything,
apparently you could have the Notes app.
So we've got Ecamm here,
however, you're gonna notice
there's still no audio showing up,
which is why this can be so frustrating
because in my Ecamm on my computer,
I'm seeing the Rodecaster audio bouncing.
I'm recording this into Ecamm right now,
so clearly the audio is there.
If I were to stream to YouTube or Twitch or wherever,
the audio would be there
but it's just getting it out to Zoom that doesn't work.
Now there's this little options box down here
and it says "Mute when capturing,"
I'm gonna uncheck that.
And now we're going to add in a second audio source
since all of my audio is running through the Rodecaster Pro,
I'm gonna add the Rodecaster Pro stereo as an audio source.
And in your situation,
just select whichever audio source you're using.
So if you're using a different interface
like the Focusrite, you'll be able to select that,
if you're just using a single USB mic,
whatever your audio source is,
that's what you select right here.
And if you're in an advanced audio situation
I would think something may be involving music,
you can also add more than just one other source
in addition to Ecamm.
Now the Rodecaster doesn't have the same mute option,
so we're just gonna keep that there at a hundred percent.
And now this is sort of the weird thing that's happening,
is we see both of these
are automatically going into output channels one and two,
you see left and right stereo signals.
And what's strange is Ecamm is still showing nothing,
but the Rodecaster is showing audio
because that's where the audio is coming from.
And so the simplest way I can think of explaining it
is that basically loopback is taking Ecamm
which is not sending out an audio signal,
and then it's taking the Rodecaster
and it's just sort of smashing them all together
and throwing them out as a new source.
And I have named that source Ecamm virtual audio.
So now if I go into Zoom and I open up Preferences,
you can see my Ecamm virtual audio
that we just created is right there.
One other quick tip if you're not already doing this
when you're in your Zoom audio settings,
you can select the option that says,
"Show in-meeting option to "Enable Original Sound."
And then when you do that, let's start a meeting real quick.
So here's my Zoom meeting.
It's infinitely great as you can see.
Because I selected that option right up here,
it says, "Turn On Original Sound.
If I click that,
now it's gonna take away all of Zoom's processing
and it's just going to be my original audio.
So sometimes zoom tries to be helpful
by deciding it's gonna cancel out echoes
and it's gonna reduce background noise
and do all this stuff.
But if you've already got a decent audio setup
that can sometimes cause more harm than good,
and so by turning that off,
now you're putting everything into your control.
And if you've got a decent audio setup
that can actually make things sound a lot better
and a lot more clear,
it's not gonna be perfect of course
because it is still Zoom,
but it's gonna sound significantly better.
And just remember though
you're gonna have to turn this on or off
every time you start a meeting.
So by default, your original audio will be turned off
every time you start a meeting
or every time you join a meeting
and you'll have to click that button every single time.
And so this right here is the basic setup that you need
to send a virtual audio signal out to Zoom using loopback.
And hopefully as you sort of notice by me accidentally
even adding in the nodes app,
the options are basically limitless.
So kind of like Ecamm, one of my favorite things about it
is that it can be so simple
or it can be crazy complex if you want it to.
If you have an idea of like, could I do this or that,
there's probably a way to do it in Ecamm,
Loopback is kind of the same thing
where it can be very simple and very basic
and it can just send one signal to one place
or if you have some crazy idea of like,
I need to route this here and send this here
and mix these two together and put those there,
you can totally do it.
And you can create basically an unlimited number
of virtual devices.
So if you're using loopback with different applications
maybe you've got Ecamm audio for Zoom
but you've got other applications
for other things that you do,
you can just keep those there and just switch between them
at any time, or they will all just show up
as sources in your application.
And as I mentioned, I kind of live on Zoom
and Ecamm is one of my favorite tools.
So here's a few other Zoom and Ecamm videos.
If you like them, you can leave them on loop
until you want to come back and watch more videos
until you want to loopback, loop back
feeling a little loopy from these puns today.
(upbeat music)