Zoom Audio Tips – For Music Teachers and Fitness Instructors

- 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. 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.