- We have received a lot of requests
to detail a little bit more effectively
how to use audio in zoom calls.
For music teachers who are looking to use zoom
and use the audio functions within zoom
for music instruction,
for yoga for fitness instructors
that wanna have music incorporated
in their video conferences.
There are a variety of different settings
in zoom that we can use
that will optimize the audio in zoom
for our purposes which are not just talking face to face
and having meetings.
So today we're gonna take a look at
optimizing your audio settings in zoom.
On DottoTech.
(chill jazz intro)
Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing
this fine day?
And we have a whole series of videos
that we've been producing on zoom
as more people are using video conferencing
from the home in order to keep their businesses going
in this time of change that we're all experiencing
due to the COVID pandemic.
So I wanted to dive in today
a little deeper in to zoom's audio settings.
Now, zoom as it's designed,
out of the box,
is designed as a meeting platform
for people to have meetings
and to incorporate our face, our voice,
and maybe some assets from our computer,
such as screen sharing or some video sharing
or some presentation sharing,
going back and forth.
Or maybe even device sharing on a whiteboard,
that sort of stuff.
But it's designed for business applications,
and the spoken word is very important
as a part of it.
They recognize that you are going to be
speaking in an environment which might have
different quality microphones,
you might have different amount of bandwidth
available to you going upstream and downstream,
and you also might have different speaker configurations.
Sometimes you'll have headphones in,
sometimes you'll have speakers that are
broadcasting the audio straight out into the air.
And each one of those
creates a different challenge for a program like zoom.
So what zoom does
is they optimize the audio
for the spoken word, for voice.
And how they do that is they first of all
compress the audio, they make it smaller
so that it will upload and download more effectively
over questionable bandwidth.
Secondly they filter it
and they process the audio to do things like
filter out background noise
and extraneous noise.
And indeed, even the microphone,
even your speakers,
the audio coming from your speakers,
making sure that doesn't bleed into the audio
that you're sending to zoom
creating an echo effect.
So they do all of this audio processing
to the audio to optimize it
to make it work really well
in a zoom meeting.
But that's at odds with itself
if you're trying to do things like music lessons.
Doesn't work well,
music teachers will tell you over and over again
it doesn't do well.
So there's a variety of instances
where that doesn't work well for us.
Let's show you how to optimize your audio settings
depending on the type of meeting
that you're going to be doing.
And we do all of the audio settings here.
We can go into just
if we click on the little caret next to the mute button
the microphone button,
you can see there
that you have access to your audio settings.
You could also get to the audio settings
from the main menu,
going into preferences,
that'll bring up the settings panel as well.
Now these audio settings
are the basic audio settings
that you use for choosing which speakers
you're gonna be listening to your sound on,
which microphone you're gonna use
if you have multiple microphones set up.
And a few other options.
Things like, this is really useful
to be able to press and hold the spacebar
to temporarily mute yourself
when you're in a meeting.
All valuable, but these aren't the audio settings
that are gonna make a difference
for what we're looking at today.
Those live here
under the advanced button.
You can decide here,
how much audio processing happens
on your audio as far as suppressing background noise,
suppressing intermediate background noise,
and echo cancellation.
Now for two of these,
for the suppressing background noise,
you can leave it set to auto,
which is the way most of us are going to be using it,
it'll filter out that air conditioning noise, et cetera.
You can set it to moderate or aggressive
if you're in a more noisy environment.
Or you can disable it completely
if you're in a sound proof booth
or you're in a studio type environment.
For the echo cancellation,
you don't have all of those options.
You can just make it more aggressive
if you have a speaker that's really echoing badly
through the microphone,
or you can leave it set for the auto.
That's all you have for those settings.
Now you can play with these settings
and adjust these settings to suit you best.
But, if you're a music teacher,
this isn't the settings that you want to do.
You want to show the in-meeting options
to enable original sound from your microphone.
Which gives us this option here.
You see that?
It says turn on original sound.
What that does is it turns off
all of zoom's audio processing,
and it allows whatever the microphone is hearing.
And you can select different microphones
just quickly from this pop up menu on the side here.
It selects whatever that microphone is hearing
and it sends it through.
So if you are a piano teacher
and you wanna have the piano and the voice
at the same time
and you want whatever the microphone picks up
to be sent through,
this is the setting that you choose.
You turn on original sound
and that will then send uncompressed
or unprocessed, excuse me,
unprocessed sound through the system.
Whatever your computer's sound card is producing
is what will go through into the zoom call.
That's the setting for music teachers.
Now there is another side of the audio setup
which is what if you're a class instructor
and you wanna include music in the background?
If you're teaching a fitness class
and you wanna have songs that are playing
along with your workout.
How do you set that up?
And for that,
we go into the screen sharing option,
this is very cool.
You go into the screen sharing option,
and into the advanced setting.
Now you wouldn't normally think to look into screen sharing
to just share audio,
but that's where it is.
And here we have the ability to share music
or computer sound only.
So when you click on this,
not much is gonna happen
other than you are going to see
that you are now sharing computer sound.
That means that whatever you hear
through your speakers
is gonna be sent through.
So if you have a Spotify account
or iTunes or if you have Google Play
or Apple Music,
you can send, and you can have a playlist playing
while the regular microphone is still active
and your video is still active.
And so let me just get it playing here.
So what you have to do,
what you have to recognize here though
and this is a very important fact,
is that the audio level
that's going out over your speakers
will probably seem very loud
to the people that are attending your meeting.
You adjust the audio volume,
not through your speaker volume,
but through the player volume.
Whatever player you're in.
So if you're in Spotify or Apple Music,
I've got iTunes up here.
You wanna adjust this audio level down low
and then you wanna make sure by talking
to the people on the other end,
when you first set it up,
you wanna make sure that the audio level
that's coming through is appropriate,
because it's a mix that you have now.
You have your microphone,
and you have the audio that's being fed from your computer.
Now that music can also come from YouTube,
it can be a YouTube video that's providing the music.
As I said, a variety of different sources.
Whatever you would normally hear on your computer speakers
is now being shared as a part of the meeting into zoom.
So there you have it,
you can now customize all of your audio settings
within zoom to a fairly good degree
to modify how zoom is used
for different special purpose type meetings.
Now we have a whole series of videos
on using zoom which are listed here,
you can see some of them.
There'll be a playlist at the end of this video
and it's again mentioned in our show notes
if you want to see the rest of our videos
on using zoom.
Now if you've enjoyed this video
and you found it valuable today,
I have one favor, two favors to ask.
First of all make sure that you subscribe to this channel,
and that you have rung the notification bell.
Secondly, if you could give us a thumbs up
and share this video with your community,
with people who you think might benefit from
learning more about using this technology,
I would appreciate your help
in getting the word out.
Until next time, I'm Steve Dotto,
have fun storming a castle.