Best ZOOM SETTINGS for LIVE MUSIC | UAD + DAW

what's up youtube welcome back to the channel if you're new here i'm tano brock and i make videos about music production mixing mastering live streaming anything music tech related so if you're interested in that kind of thing check out the channel check out some videos and if you like what you see go ahead and subscribe and you'll get updates when i post new videos and all that good stuff so today i've decided to make a video about zoom and music now this has been a relatively complicated and stressful part of my life recently just like many of you musicians out there i have recently found myself performing concerts over zoom pretty frequently and it's been quite a struggle to figure out the best way to stream high quality audio over a zoom conference call i want to be able to reproduce what i'm creating here in the studio over zoom and that hasn't been quite so easy but after a lot of research watching other youtube videos reading reddit forums and a lot of trial and error myself i figured out the best way from what i can tell at least to stream high quality audio from your home studio interface microphone daw whatever you got going on through zoom and have your audience on zoom actually hear a pretty good replication of whatever you're producing so we're going to get into that in just a second but before we do just a couple little updates and announcements you might recognize a lot of this setup from previous videos but i'm actually in a brand new space and that's why i've been a little absent from youtube recently i moved across the country i left new york in august i'm now based in los angeles and i brought a lot of my equipment my desk and my panels with me but there are a couple new things that i'm really excited about i got a new pair of speakers from cali audio that i'm super stoked about i'm getting to know them a little more and i'm going to make a video about those soon so look out for that also benq sent me this really cool screen bar plus which is a desktop light that mounts to the top of your computer monitor and lights your work surface really nicely and it has this really handy control where you can control the brightness really easily you can also control the color temperature you can make it a warmer light or a cooler light and you can have it automatically calibrate the brightness and temperature to your room so i've really enjoyed using this thanks benq for sending it to me and it's supposed to really help your eyes um and protect them from screen glare and so far it's felt really good and it's made my work environment feel a lot nicer so if you're interested in looking into one of these there's a link in the description all right guys without further ado let's get into this zoom business see you in a second [Music] all right guys welcome back so let's get into this um there are kind of a couple levels to this there are sort of the basic settings within zoom to optimize the audio and then there's sort of a more complicated issue that will depend on your interface and what you got going on um in the analog world that gets a little complicated so i'll get into that in a minute let's start with the simple basic zoom settings that you want to make sure you have set up correctly so the first thing you want to do is actually log into your zoom account in a browser so i'm going to go into safari here i'm already logged in you're going to go to settings here and scroll all the way down to the bottom or near the bottom and you want to make sure you have this enabled here so i'm going to enable it allow users to select stereo audio in their client settings that's a really important one and also allow users to select original sound in their client settings so make sure those are both enabled and then let's open up zoom real quick and make sure you're logged in and zoom that's important because you want to make sure your zoom client on your computer reflects your actual zoom settings in your account um so make sure you're logged in and then we're going to enter zoom preferences so go to zoom preferences audio preferences so you have your speaker and microphone we're actually going to get to that in a minute because uh that's kind of where it gets a little complicated depending on your interface and microphone and all that so let's scroll down and optimize these settings real quick so suppress background noise you can leave this on auto but i've actually found that it's better to leave it on low meaning that it's not going to suppress that much background noise and here we go is music and professional audio i should mention you want to make sure you have um updated zoom so version 5.4.9 i believe at the time that i'm making this video is the most recent version so make sure you are updated and in this version at least they have this music and professional audio section and this is probably the most important section that you want to worry about so you want to make sure show in meeting option to enable original sound from microphone you want to make sure that is checked basically if this isn't checked zoom sort of puts this strange compression audio warping algorithm on your audio to try to make it optimized for speech but it does really weird things if you have any sort of audio content that's not talking basically so you want to check high fidelity mode optimizes zoom audio for highest quality music great you want to check echo cancellation this is a little confusing because checking this actually disables zoom's echo cancellation algorithm which is what you want basically you want to disable all of zoom's weird algorithms and then finally stereo audio you want to make sure that is checked and again i think this might only appear if you have this setting here in in the web browser enabled allow users to select stereo audio in their client settings so really make sure you do that then this will definitely be in your settings and you'll be able to check it you can go to advanced and on macs there's only one option here echo cancellation you can just leave that on audio okay so that's pretty much it now this is where it gets a little complicated so the biggest issue that i've personally had when it comes to music and zoom is actually getting it to reproduce stereo audio even with this setting that i just showed you that says enable stereo audio and the reason comes down to the interface you have and the number of inputs that is actually being fed into zoom's system so what was happening to me is that i was using this method that i actually made a video about which i'll link in the description and up here that uses a uad interface and the uad console software to route audio to stream a nice mix that you can create in the console app and to and then stream that audio to youtube or facebook or wherever you want to stream it and so i was using that same method thinking that i could feed the audio from uad's console directly into zoom and it would work just the same way as any other streaming platform does you know if i select uad interface in obs or youtube live or facebook live or anything else it should sound the same as if i select uad interface and zoom but no it doesn't sound the same when i select my uad interface in any of the other streaming platforms it reproduces the perfect stereo mix that i'm creating in console but when i select uad interface in zoom it reproduces this mushy distorted mono signal even when i have stereo audio enabled and all that and after some research i found out that the reason is when you select an input device in zoom that has more than two input channels my interface has 30 input channels even if i'm only using the first two channels it sums all the channels into one mono signal which obviously is going to sound terrible if you have a nice stereo mix you want that to be summed into a single stereo signal and that's what i'm doing with my routing method in console but zoom is interpreting it differently zoom is actually taking all the channels each individual mic channel plus the monitor section and summing it all into a single distorted mono signal so that method doesn't work basically selecting your interface as your input device in zoom is never going to give you a stereo signal and so what you have to do is use a virtual routing app like black hole or sound flower or loopback or something like that to create a virtual stereo signal that only has two channels and two channels only you can then route all your audio whether it's coming out of a daw or whether it's coming from uad's console or just from your system spotify itunes or whatever you can route that to the virtual audio device and then in zoom you select the virtual audio device as the input and since that input is only two channels zoom will then interpret it as a stereo signal so let's go back into the computer and i'll show you how this looks so i am using black hole i will link black hole in the description and there are two versions of black hole when you go and download it there's two channel version and the 16 channel version download both if you want but for this as i just explained we want to use the two channel version because we really only want two channels and two channels only so as you see here i have black hole two channel selected as my microphone and my speaker is universal audio thunderbolt that's great because i have my whole monitor controller and everything hooked up to the universal audio thunderbolt so i'll be hearing everything through this and zoom will be receiving the signal through black hole okay great so let me open up my uad console and if you don't have a uad interface the concept here will still apply so basically this is my mic channel here you can see my signal going um and then here's my whole monitor section and if i play something on spotify you'll see it appear here as well [Music] all right yeah so you see that that all looks good so now we want to get all this information into zoom and if you have loopback it costs 100 bucks i'm pretty sure you can do this without a diw but black hole is free and i assume most of you watching this are going to have some sort of diw so i'm going to show you how to do this using a daw so i'm going to open up logic here and i have a new project let's go into the preferences and we're going to want to make the input your interface the output black hole two channel and apply so now what i'm gonna do is actually just have one stereo audio track and make the input of that audio track the monitor section of uad's console app that way everything that's running through the monitor section of my interface meaning all the analog inputs plus all my system audio and any mixing that i do in the console app will be going into this one channel now if you don't have a uad interface you might have some sort of app that came with your interface where you could do something similar and if not that's totally cool you can actually just create a mix within your daw and then send that directly to black hole while monitoring it at the same time using an aggregate device if you don't know what i'm talking about check the other link in my description on live streaming with the diw i explain all about that and give a detailed tutorial about how to set up your daw for live streaming using sound flower or black hole so i have this record enabled remember my audio output is black hole two channel so if i go back to my console app and unmute my vocal mic so it actually is running through the monitor of console there we go and you see we're getting signal here all right so let's go into zoom and check to make sure this is all working so i'm going to open up zoom create a new meeting join with computer audio and first thing we want to do is check our microphone and speaker settings so go here click this little carrot you want to make sure your microphone is black hole two channel or sound flower if you're using sound flower or whatever other virtual audio device you're using and your speaker will just be your interface or whatever else you're monitoring through so now we're getting nothing and that's because we're also getting nothing here in the monitor section of my interface and that's because my mic channel is muted so let's go into console and unmute this go back to zoom and now we should be getting it nice perfect the next thing you want to do is up here turn on original sound that super important otherwise all those advanced options in zoom audio settings won't be coming through and you can even click this and select black hole 2 channel to always enable original sound when you're using black hole and real quick i just want to give a really handy tip for all you uad users out there when you're doing some sort of musical performance over zoom and you're streaming your audio from your interface you want to hear yourself and you also want to hear the other participants on the zoom meeting but you don't want the audio from the zoom meeting to be streamed back into the zoom meeting and so i found a really handy way to get around that issue and here we go go into settings in console and make the outputs one and two virtual one and virtual two and then in audio midi setup let's head there really quick um in your universal audio thunderbolt tab go to configure speakers and make sure that the left is virtual one and right is virtual two great apply done get out of that virtual one virtual two here and i've already named it but i linked virtual one virtual 2 and called this system audio so now if we go into zoom and we test the speaker [Music] that's going to keep going and you see that it's coming in here system audio which is exactly what we want then we can actually mute it so we don't hear it anymore what you're hearing is what would be streamed to the zoom audience but that signal is still going to our cues which mean it's still going to our headphones um so we can basically hear the content of the zoom meeting but mute it for the audience so there's no echo feedback issues so if you do have a uad interface that is a super handy tip so that's pretty much it you should be all set up as long as this says turn off original sound up in the corner that means the original sound is on and as long as you have all these preferences set up high fidelity music mode echo cancellation stereo audio and remember very important your input device needs to be only two channels the way i found to do that is to use black hole two channel to route everything into a two channel input again using an interface directly even if you think it's stereo which it is zoom will sum that into a distorted mono signal alright guys i hope this was helpful if you're like me and you've been streaming concerts over zoom conference calls you've probably had issues with audio and i hope this will help get past some of those obstacles if you have any questions leave them in the comments if you have any other comments or suggestions or ideas or if you've found some other way to do this even better please let me know because i'm curious and i'm sure it'll help anyone else who's curious and interested so with that i'm going to sign off if you like this video give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel for more content like this alright guys i'll see you in the next you

Channel: Tano Brock

Views: 44,039

Rating: 4.9747972 out of 5

Keywords: zoom, Logic Pro x, universal audio, live stream, concert, live music, high quality, best settings, zoom settings, zoom music, music zoom, zoom daw, zoom Logic Pro, uad, console, zoom concert

Id: o8qoPv6NDdI

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021