How to stream audio from your DAW through Zoom on Windows

what's up everyone my name is adam fangsfood i'm a ableton certified trainer and i do a lot of teaching over zoom i'm actually a windows pc user and a lot of my students are as well and the one problem that a lot of them have when they're trying to share sound from their daw is uh getting it to actually broadcast in high quality or even broadcast at all over zoom so i figured i'd put together this little video showing a quick and easy way to do that on windows okay it's not that quick or easy but this will get the job done all right so we're gonna be using a free piece of software called voice meter it's a virtual mixer for windows this is what it looks like here and we're going to use it to mix a microphone source with audio from our daw in my case it's ableton live but you know you could use fruity loops or whatever and then we're going to have all of that piping through zoom in high quality stereo alright so let's get started first of all after you install voice meter and you open it up you're going to see that it can mix hardware inputs it can mix virtual inputs and then it can have actual hardware outputs as well as virtual outputs we're going to be using all of those so first of all for your hardware input what you need to do is set it to whatever your microphone source is so in my case my microphone is going through my audio interface so i chose the line input on my audio box i'm going through a channel strip so it's actually using the line input now the wdm versus mme here is actually kind of important mme is a much higher latency driver so you're going to want to choose wdm for whatever your mic source might be now if you're not going through an audio interface that could be a headsight headset mic a usb mic even god forbid a webcam microphone whatever it is choose wdm and choose that microphone source and there's a little glitch there as i selected it but here we go now um i want to be able to have that go through to my hardware output so one sort of side effect of this is you will hear yourself in your headphones now it'll be a small delay but with wdm that should be like 30 milliseconds or so so it shouldn't be too distracting if i were to mute you wouldn't be able to hear me so it's important to keep that on now the other input that we're going to be using is this virtual input right here this is where we're going to be sending audio from our daw and also from windows if you wanted to like share a youtube video or you know play something in your media player you know share some mp3s stream those whatever that's going to be going through this virtual input now as far as the outputs are concerned we're going to actually need two outputs so there's going to be a virtual output that we're going to be using for zoom but then the main out is one that i'm also going to need because this is actually how i'm going to hear myself as well as here ableton live windows audio all that other stuff so in this drop down here i have my output set to in my case it's my little audio interface the audiobox azio driver because that's what my headphones are plugged into so you're just going to try to find whatever it is you have your headphones plugged into and choose that now if it's not azio or azio's the best go ahead and see if you can find it as wdm alright now i'm going to go into my daw again in my case it's ableton live i'll go into my preferences control comma and under audio you're going to want to make sure that the drivers type is set to asio and your audio device is going to need to be set to the voice meter virtual asio all right now once i do that it should be sending my audio through voice meter using that virtual input so i'm going to hit play this may be my finest beat by the way um i offer lessons if you want to learn how to do this uh if i open the voice meter oh there's my microphone there on the left okay so that's working but hey look at that i've got a virtual input right here that super fat beat is piping through it and i can see that is also outputting first of all to my headphones so i can hear it here myself but it's also going out that virtual output so make sure neither of these are muted all right okay so far so good all right now we need to configure a few things in windows to get windows audio going through this virtual input as well and then i'll open up zoom and we'll take a look at how that needs to look alright so as far as windows is concerned you can just right click on your volume icon and choose open sound settings and under choose your output device under the drop down you're going to choose voice meter input all right once i do that i should be able to type audio from any of my standard windows applications web browser whatever through zoom as well so we have a little youtube video here i'll hit play that looks pretty good let's check voicemeeter look at that [Music] okay so a few things uh you should note about that um because your windows audio is now going to voice meter if you quit voice meter suddenly you're not gonna hear windows um so it's a good idea to be able to just kind of set and forget this stuff so what i would suggest in voice meter under your menu just set it to automatically run on windows startup so that voice meter will always be running in the background and if you hate seeing it minimized you can always tell it to minimize to the system tray as well which will kind of reduce a little bit of visual clutter all right so at this point we have audio from my microphone coming to voice meter we have audio from ableton live coming to voice meter and we also have windows audio going into voice meter so as long as we set up zoom to set voice meter as its source it should get microphone ableton and whatever else from windows so let's check out our zoom settings now so when i open up zoom i'll go to my settings and let's click audio what we're going to do is a little counter-intuitive now if you are on a mac and you're sharing your screen you can just check a box that says share computer sound and then mac actually has a zoom actually has a core audio driver for mac that you can select as your output source and then voila you have you know ableton audio or whatever going into zoom what we're going to do here is a little bit hacky but it's actually pretty sweet once it's working we are going to have zoom basically get all of its audio through its microphone input and we'll never even have to check that share computer sound box so under microphone under this drop down you want to make sure that the microphone is set to the voicemeeter output and sure enough i can see i have peak meters and everything going it's getting everything as a mic input through this voice meter so as far as zoom is concerned now my microphone is actually going to be my real microphone it's going to be the audio out of ableton live and anything coming through windows now there are some other settings you're going to need to to set and zoom to make sure that it's not doing you know crappy um echo cancellation and gating and just weird processing to your sound um because it's assuming it's a mic source so it's trying to like you know make it sound better which in our case would actually make things sound worse so first of all make sure you do not have automatically adjust microphone volume checked all right you want a nice static volume so your levels aren't jumping around throughout your meeting suppress background noise you can't turn it off but just go ahead and set it to low and then we have music and professional audio right here so you want to check the box that says show in meeting option to enable original sound you also want to check the box that says hi fidelity music mode do not check echo cancellation otherwise it's going to try to echo cancel your fat beats and that's totally unacceptable the other thing you want to make sure is checked is the stereo audio box right here otherwise everything is going to be mono all right so just make sure that uh your settings look kind of like mine i'm on the latest version of zoom as of september 8 2021 so you know in later versions of zoom these settings may look a little bit different but more or less they should be similar you just want to be able to be able to original enable original sound put on high fidelity music mode and turn on stereo audio all right so once all these settings are good let's start a meeting and there's just one more thing we're going to need to set to make sure all of our um sound and zoom is top notch so i'll hit start all right now i have zoom and right here you'll see that original sound is currently set to off that's not a good thing that means it's still trying to do all its crazy microphony echo cancellation stuff so i'm going to hit this drop down right here and i want to see it says select a microphone to always use original sound i'll just check this box here the voice meter output so now original sound has turned on and it will actually automatically turn on every single time you launch zoom so this is you only have to do this once all right now original sound is on everything coming in through zoom is going to be from the microphone and all the daw audio and everything should be really nice and clean and in stereo okay one final thing i'm going to tell you let's go back to voice meter because you have enabled original sound zoom is no longer going to try to do any fancy noise cancellation echo cancellation or anything on your microphone now my microphone sounds good because i'm actually going through a channel strip with a built-in gate and all kinds of stuff and it's eq'd so it's it's ready to rock if you're using a headset mic or a lower quality microphone that's not going to be super good because all of your room noise and everything is going to be piping through it's going to sound terrible that's where this audibility knob and voice meter is going to be really handy so the audibility control actually is a compressor and a gate so what you can do if you're getting a bunch of weird background noise and stuff like that is just slowly turn up this audibility knob and i'm not going to do it on mine because it'll start jacking with my my mic but you slowly turn it up until your background noise from your microphone is gated out that way you'll be able to talk people will be able to hear you clearly through your microphone but when you're playing fat beats case in point it's going to come through nice and clean and they're not going to have to listen to your air conditioner [Music] all right so that is how you do it in windows hopefully a lot of people find this video useful again i offer lessons in ableton live so if anybody wants to schedule something with me you can check out my website which is going to be in the video description and uh otherwise yeah happy zooming

Channel: Adam Fangsrud

Views: 2,132

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Id: 6lW6PlgEfoQ

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021