For Music Teachers: Using Loopback by Rogue Amoeba

hello it's greg charest and i'm here to teach you about some software called loopback loopback is made by a company called rogue amoeba and that company has made a piece of software that is for macs only so i'm sorry pc people this doesn't apply to you but perhaps you'd be interested to see what's possible because i'm sure that something similar is available for your uh your platform what we're looking at here is essentially what would what would happen if you were to open the software for the first time i'm going to operate under the assumption that you know how to install software so once you go to rogue amoeba's website and download loopback and install the first time you open it you'll be given a loopback audio device which is here in this left hand column these other two devices these virtual devices will not exist for you those are something that i've created and i'm currently using and i'm going to leave this off for the purposes of the video because your audio source is actually coming here from this quicktime screen video okay so enough about that here's what this software does we're gonna make an audio device in other words we're gonna trick your computer into believing that all of the sources of audio on your entire computer are one thing your computer is going to think that all of these sources of audio are basically a microphone so what we need to do is we can first of all we can label this let's make a junior high band audio device and i'm going to call it that because my junior high band meets at the end of the day and fully virtually so they meet a hundred percent from home i never see them in person sad you know uh they need to have some tools and one of the tools i need them to is my voice so under sources i'm going to click the add button and i have my yeti stereo microphone plugged in via usb so i'm going to select that that's an audio source i want the ability to play my piano for them which you can hear but as of right now they would not be able to hear i have a usb keyboard controller plugged in and i'm using main stage three again this is a mac so that's my uh my audio engine for midi i want them to be able to hear a youtube video or the audio at least the audio from a youtube video i will be able to share my screen in zoom or in google meets but i want them for sure to hear the audio so i'm going to select google chrome as an audio source the final aspect of this is that zoom which is currently running on my computer is going to need to be an audio source because i'm going to need to be able to hear the students speaking of which the other thing that we need to install into the software is a monitor and anything that is plugged in right now that can accept sound as a monitor can be chosen so i happen to have my headphones plugged into the yeti stereo microphone but uh let's say alternatively for the purposes of let's just pretend i was in the band room for a minute teaching synchronously to students at home and in school i might want to play audio over the over the band room stereo so this is going to allow me to also plug in a cord to my computer's headphone jack and then route that into the pa system in the band room you can see that every time i add a device it adds these these teal green or blue lines those are effectively wires and the wires can be made you can highlight them and get a little bit bold and you can actually delete them if you wish and the opposite is true you can make connections so what i did was i just clicked on sort of this it looks like it's a circle looks like a port and i'm just clicking and dragging from one side to the other and that's makes makes your life very quick and easy drag and drop one thing i can tell you or another thing i can tell you i should say is that if this was for a fully virtual meeting i would have one small problem and this is something that i've learned through trial and error that is that um i i don't want to be able to hear the audio of my voice again and because the yeti stereo microphone is an audio source here it's going to send the audio from what i'm speaking back into the microphone and it won't be the microphone it'll be my headphones but i'll hear a slight delay of my own voice that's kind of annoying so i can create a bypass for that i'm going to go here to the center to output channels i'm going to add some more output channels here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to delete these cables these virtual cables here from the yeti stereo microphone and i'm going to route the audio from channels 3 and 4 into there and i'm going to put all of the audio into channels 3 and four again click on the circle and drag i'm gonna do that for everything except my microphone here's the microphone i'm gonna avoid that zoom audio i'll be able to hear the kids speaking to me through my headphones and if you didn't notice this already this little pass-through device at the bottom here is the whole point of loopback you need that and it automatically wires itself up and just leave that alone that's the easiest thing for you to to know about that so this is going to set it up for me that any of my audio can go into the external headphone jack it could also potentially if i wanted it to go into my computer speakers if i needed to the other beauty about having all of these things here is and i'm sure you may have seen this already is that i can turn each individual device on and off and all of the devices have their own individual volume control so that is also true by the way of the inputs so if i want google chrome to be just like a little bit softer in in everyone's ears i can turn the audio down okay let's put this into practice we've created this virtual device but now we need to actually use it so a couple things are worth noting here i'm going to start up a zoom meeting and i'm going to show you what i would do if i was creating a zoom meeting i've got the setup on a different screen but let's see if this starts i'm going to drag my window over so that you can see it hi and so this is this is a one-person zoo meeting except to say hello to you when you are in zoom you have the opportunity down here and it says i'm i'm muted right now in the in this meeting but you have the opportunity to click on this arrow and to choose so for example if i wanted the audio to come from my external camera then i could choose the camera's audio and you can see right now the audio is coming from quicktime screen video that is you can see to the left hand side of the screen here that is the audio source i'm using to record this this particular video and what you don't see is the junior high band audio device but if i turn that device on it should show in the into zoom as an audio source so if i'm going to have that meeting i need to for sure pardon me main stage is a little twitchy right now but i can choose to have my microphone be junior high band so zoom thinks that everything that we just put everything that we just put into loopback zoom thinks is my microphone i am also able to route the audio into any number of places but i find that this works the best if i choose the same output and that's because if you recall i set up all these monitors here and so your zoo meeting now can have all of that audio if i was on youtube and uh you know that i'm i have a youtube video ready in the background here okay the kids at home they can hear that audio i don't need to screen share for that to be present let's stop that for a minute i don't need to screen share for that to be present that doesn't need to be part of what i'm doing it's possible to screen share all of those things i can choose to share my you know google chrome the foundation warm-ups but the kids can hear it so if they had paper sheet music at home but you wanted them to hear the audio to play along and see you if you were conducting that can be a solution for you in the past if you wanted them to hear that you would have to choose music or computer sound only because zoom thinks my microphone is that virtual audio device we created we don't need to click share you can automatically hear all of those things so i'm going to end this meeting right here i'm going to send you on your way we are going to uh just talk quickly one one final detail here about this is that uh when you are setting all of these up you definitely are able to choose between these audio sources i will caution you that when you are working with these virtual wires these teal blue green wires here it is very easy to delete them there's a delete button or virtual button down here on the left but it's also right next to this minus sign there's a plus sign for new virtual device but if you collect that minus sign it deletes the virtual device and there's no undo for that so once you accidentally delete those they're gone luckily it's pretty easy to set up and you can always come back to this video to learn how to do that all over again if you need it i hope you have a great day thanks for watching take care

Channel: Gregg Charest

Views: 9,427

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Id: yNr2sP92YAs

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020