Zoom for Musicians: How to stream your DAW

hello everybody today we're going to be looking at remote working tools and specifically zoom and listen to from audio movers which are two things which could really help you uh collaborate in these slightly trying times with your songwriting friends your fellow musicians your clients if you're a composer all that kind of thing so um first of all hands up all of those of you who have spent most of the last year uh all day every day on zoom yep that's quite a lot of you and it is exhausting and if you're trying to do music over zoom it can be incredibly frustrating because straight out of the packet um it sounds what's the technical phrase pants that's right it sounds really bad i mean it sounds great for speech and it's and it's optimized for speech and that's the problem because the first thing you're going to need to do is use headphones because um one of the things which completely knackers um the audio on zoom and pretty much every other video conferencing platform is echo cancellation so that you don't want to hear your voice coming back down the microphone the other end of your conversation so they've got lots of clever software which filters that out at the same time it completely um makes music sound rubbish and it sticks it all into mono so the whole thing sounds like a bad 78 record from the from the 1910s or something like that so we're going to stick on headphones and uh all that kind of stuff right now uh if you go into uh zoom and here's my zoom already open uh this will probably be quite familiar to you you need to go down here to the audio settings in the bottom left-hand corner and up you get all this choice go into audio settings at the bottom then scroll down until you find this bit here which says music and professional audio check the box which says show in meeting option to enable original sound that's that little box up there next down turn off echo cancellation you do not want echo cancellation and finally turn on stereo audio you do want stereo audio right those uh those settings will now make an enormous difference to the quality of the sound and um but you do need to make sure they're set the second thing to to bear in mind while you're in this setting is when you are actually transmitting keep an eye you may need to open this up and keep this on a separate screen keep an eye on this meter here because it's really easy when you start playing music for it to go to start clipping and going all kinds of things so you've got lots of places in the signal chain where you might end up with distortion and that's one of them suppress background noise this is another one turn it to low you want to get as little um you want as little processing power as humanly possible going on little processing of the audio signal going on as humanly possible so when you've actually done all that this button up here will now enable you to turn on original sound now joining me uh from his home is my assistant brad and brad will now show you from his end what original sound sounds like okay we're now joined um from his luxury suite of apartments about five miles down the road by my assistant brad so what we're going to do is we're going to try first of all playing music straight out of zoom um this is coming out of um out of cubase and this is just normal zoom sound so this isn't um with the high quality stuff turned on so you'll be able to hear and then brad can tell you what he thinks as well so here's the first example [Music] okay what do we think what was that like uh it's almost like there's a gate on it of some kind um it sounds uh it sounds okay but yeah very wobbly very sort of um it's hard to really get the measure of it yes indeed right i'm now going to turn on this little button in the top left here which is uh original sound so now we'll hear it as brad hears it from his end with original sound turned on so enough of those dwarves okay what do you think of that uh much clearer much faster much clearer although as a side effect i can hear myself talking okay yeah there's all kinds of yeah well that may be also because of the complicated routing thing which is going on at this end which i'll explain but okay i tell you well let's try the clap thing this thing see if there's any more latency okay one two three clap oh so with high quality audio you also get a significant amount of latency okay try that one more time i'm going to turn off original sound now this is just normal zoom sound okay one two three clap yeah okay now the complicated thing we're trying to get your door into zoom is the is the routing and there's a couple of ways of doing this because the trouble is you can't just take um audio from um cubase or whatever and say oh here zoom can you pick this up it's you either have to use a software solution which essentially creates a little virtual patch cable from your door to zoom and there's various permutations on this which i'll talk about in a second or you use a hardware solution the hardware solution is you tell the door output this and this means having a sound card with uh at least four uh inputs and outputs so you say door i want you to output that sound via output through and four you stick it through a little mixer which you can add a microphone to and stick it back into one and two so it goes on a little loop and then one and two is what feeds zoom so it's a hardware loop basically where it goes out of one pair of outputs through potentially a mixer where you add other stuff in and back in to another pair of inputs how you set this up it can be really hard and difficult and depends on the settings of your own particular audio interfaces to and or how you do it but that is one way of doing it i've done that successfully for many years um if you have this the way we work here is slightly esoteric to put it mildly now quite a lot of you ask about this box i've got here this is a vision mixer called an atom mini extreme pro and it has audio inputs but the zoom treats it as a webcam so what we do is we have the audio coming out of a mixer into this and then this goes into uh zoom which is not a normal way of doing it and it works really well but it's uh you know quite a complicated high-end way of doing it so the other way the the way most people would root um the audio on a pc from their door into zoom is using this which is um vb meter it's a donation-wear piece of software um and it works but it's really unnecessarily complicated and what essentially you do is you root the output from your studio uh to vb meter and from vb meter uh to uh wherever you want it to go so look here we go do you see down here here look voice meter comes up as an option uh when you when you choose your audio interface voicemeeter virtual asio comes up as an option and you use one of those okay then when you go to voicemeeter [Music] you then route it out to whatever piece of hardware or software you want so you can send a virtual signal so then when you go into zoom let's get zoom back up again oh where has it gone here we go okay oh it's going to do this sorry about that let's get this up uh here you can see that the um input voice meter is is a virtual microphone so you can do it that way now there are lots of reasons why that doesn't always work and it's complicated it doesn't like some focusrite interfaces it's a bit there's a much it's this system this this way of doing things the virtual cable is much much better on macs um uh where there are a number of solutions there's one which is i think free called black hole which i've used which is good the one i i mean the one i use is expensive but absolutely bomb proof it's called loopback from amoeba it is so simple to use if you have a running program like logic you can just add it as a source and then you can you've even got little volume meter so you can balance it against your macbook microphone for example then you can route the whole thing um to another thing and then you can choose different monitoring so you can have monitor you can listen on headphones and then that if you name it sort of like loopback logic or something that will then come up as an audio source inside um inside a zoom for example and that works really really well the latency is minimal and it's extremely good and so if you're on a mac that and you can afford the hundred dollars it costs then i would definitely definitely definitely go for that so i've just taken a step outside because it's a nice sunny day to explain to you how you set up zoom with a mac um so that it'll um you'll be able to broadcast in decent quality uh the output from your door okay so what in essence we've got to do is here's your door here's zoom you need something in between the two a sort of virtual cable so to speak which joins uh the door to zoom and there's a whole load of different ways of doing this now the reason it's a great deal simpler to set this up on a mac is because zoom have a thing called the zoom audio device which does this for you you don't have to buy it it's just there so what you do is you route the output from logic to the zoom audio device and that will then just pop up inside zoom and so you can screen share and all that kind of thing let me show you how to do that first then i'll show you another way to do it because there are one or two slight disadvantages that we're doing it so here we have here's zoom hello zoo um if we go first of all let's go to logic and we have our little track here and we're going to go into preferences into audio and have a look now currently it's set to going out of the external headphones if i click on this there zoom audio device ding that's what we want apply and if you're going to zoom and we look down here you'll still see um your here we're going to select my microphone as that one there we go there's my microphone going in now the zoom audio device works when you share the screen and you won't see zoom audio device come up inside logic until you have shared your screen here at least once because the first time you click on this button here and go to for example uh where we got um advanced here we go computer audio for example when you first do this it will come up saying oh do you want to install um the zoom audioverse and go yes of course i do duh etc and um that will then make life a great deal um simpler now that you just now you'll square it you share the screen you broadcast the um uh your door and it'll pick up the system audio job done the downside of it is the latency is horrible so if you're trying to play something it's going to be you know so it's going to be a big big big delay and you don't have as much control over the whole thing as if you use another thing which i'm very keen on which is something called loopback loopback is a system which routes audio internally from one part of your computer to another and it's really really good so let me just stop the sharing thing and i'll show you how loopback works so here we have there's the door okay let me make that go away this is loopback audio boom here's it set up so if i push play first of all i need to root it to here's loopback it's called logic loopback this setup and you can see it's taking an input from my microphone it's taking an input from logic play it you'll see it there you go and it mixes them together you can you can [Music] adjust the volumes and things like that and then you can choose any number of um outputs um which can be external headphones or monitors or anything else you like so it's really powerful um and the way you set it up let me just set up a brand new one click new virtual device we'll call it hello everybody okay so click a source let's have uh logic click another source let's have my microphone where's my micro finger that is okay and then we'll choose uh something to monitor on external headphones that'll do nicely i'll turn off this other i'll turn off the old one now we've got there go right so now hello everybody is rooting all this stuff through okay so now so let's now go into logic go to preferences audio and now i'm going to look for hello everybody they go brilliant now in zoom same deal go down here to audio and hello everybody now the advantage one of the other advantages of this is you don't have to be in screen sharing mode so in other words you can now we've got original sound turned on we've got the audio from logic flowing in let me put the headphones on job done so that gives you loopbacks it's not cheap but it does do what it does exceptionally well and um i wouldn't be without it frankly um so that's how you set it up on on a mac it is a great deal simpler um than on a pc um because this zoom audio device thing which makes it really simple to do and there's no equivalent of that on a pc because of the azio drivers and things like that but anyway good news there is just one other major disadvantage with uh the audio in um zoom if you record a zoom call and you want this same high quality audio you can't have it the recording is in mono and the video quality is down to sort of 380 or something ridiculous it's uh so for all the hd you know beautifulness when it's broadcast and all the incredible stereo the recording is minimal video quality and 1950's audio quality come on zoom please please just sort that out it just will make everybody's life so much easier in the meantime there is um probably the best solution of all absolutely hands down the best solution of all and it's called listen to which is a plug-in from audio movers um this is what it looks like okay so here is my little session uh my uh it's a bit of game music and i want to share this with my game producer so before i start a video call and it can be on the video calls completely separate so it doesn't matter what you're doing you can use you know whereby skype zoom whatever i go to the final the stereo output and i put a plugin on it and the plugin is called listen to okay there it is okay click and when it comes up there it is um first of all you log in this costs 100 pounds a year or 10 pounds or 10 dollars a month if you just need it for a bit um now you have a whole load of you can call this um audio movers test you can give it a name and that will come up at the other end um when they when they do it if that's what you want to do the latency and the quality depend entirely on how fast your internet connection is you can put it down as low as a tenth of a second or as much much as two seconds and the audio quality which default it defaults to half a second latency and 128 kilobits so 128 kilobits is sort of normal mp3 standard um in other words fine uh but it can go up to um 24-bit full 32-bit full quality wav so you know really full broadcast quality audio and then when you've uh when you've done that you've set it up you're happy with that you start the stream and you copy the stream link now the stream link you can then email to your friend or stick into a discord or slack or anything else they click on it and it opens a web browser at their end um here i'll show you what happens hang on let me get it up okay so here's my web browser if i post that in up comes my listening there we go we've got hollywood here uh you click to start listening and now it's ready to go and look it comes up with the name and everything else and it tells you it's two-channel royal street um i'm now going to bring my assistant brad in and we will give this a go and see what he thinks so i've sent you the link um when you click the link what you see uh so i copy and pasted it into my browser uh i see a nice cityscape of some kind um and then there's a small little box similar to like a wii transfer that says start listening hit that and then it pops up with a white box it says live that it says untitled so presumably we can name our sessions um all of the audio information uh in terms of uh sample rate bitrate all that stuff two channels and then um just i'm awaiting some audio by the looks of it looks like it's a little bomb okay let's so let's now play this and see what you think my okay and what do you think of that it sounds it legitimately sounds as if i'm listening to it on my own door okay so it's that's full quality that even better even better than high quality zoom 100 yeah if if if you're gonna wanna if you're gonna send any sort of audio from your door i would highly recommend that one because there's just no there's no artifacts there's no latency um seems perfectly in sync with when you start and stop as well yeah i mean it's there's a half there's heart it you can set the uh you you can set the uh plugin to give you any amount of latency you want so you can have from point one of a second but it depends very much on uh your bandwidth so if you're on a slow connection um you won't want to get you probably won't be able to get half a second without it crackling and bumping and things like that but i think we're lucky that our internet connections are quite strong strong and stable yeah strong and stable just like you yeah quite actually no maybe not maybe not maybe not okay so look um the other advantage is you don't have of audio movies is it's just a pl if you are genuinely broadcasting through the door it just goes straight out you don't have any of this faffing with a vb meter or complicated wiring regimes and things like that so okay so audio movers is hands down the winner i think probably isn't it yeah it's that way to me yep okay thanks very much mate so there you go um audio movers is is phenomenal absolutely phenomenal and it will do other things as well you can put uh you can put the uh listening uh um uh uh plug-in on an auxiliary track in your door and then record what comes in straight into your door so look you put the receiver in and it comes up in here how cool is that so you can then um and you have a choice of you don't just have to go with stereo um it will do up to something crazy hang on where is he yeah there's it will it will record oh i mean it will transmit um 5.1 7.1 you can do anything you like it's um it is becoming the studio standard because it's so incredibly reliable and incredibly inexpensive and it's just so easy to start if you're going to do this the basic version you can share with 40 other people so if you're working in education you want to share something with a class 40 is normally fine if you need more than that you can buy an extra license and you can listen to more you know more people can listen to it but if you're working with um you know a record producer or something and they want to share their mix with you this is the way to do it in the old days it used to be source connect and source connect is extremely good and it integrates more thoroughly into pro tools so that you can remote control you've got talkback and all kinds of clever things but for the vast but it is really expensive and it's um a pig to set up because of firewalls and ports and all kinds of things it's not this straightforward the joy of listen to is it doesn't try to do um video and all that kind of thing it means you can do it on any system you like so i'm just sitting here in my headphones on on zoom i could be on team skype discord uh slack anything and you just use this completely separately and it works perfectly so if you want to share your music and collaborate with people in real time audio move is the way to do it that's it simple as that okay if you're doing anything else and if you're particularly if you're if you're playing live um live piano or something like that and you want to share it with your class using um zoom with the high quality audio works great audio movers by listen to also there's also a free a standalone app now as well which you can just plug your auto your audio interface um mic into so you don't need a door or anything like that but anyway if this is your jam this is what you want to do uh just start i'll save you a lot of time because i've wasted so much time trying to figure this out uh start with listen to that's it okay start and finish with listen to actually um and if you want to do zoom uh there's you know you need to overcome these many and various little trials and tribulations about rooting the rooting audio is only major problem on a pc because it because of the azio drivers and some people find the whole uh vb meter thing dead easy to use uh i don't uh and um i've had all kinds of problems with it but on the mac loot back uh has saved my bacon many many times it's absolutely wonderful good i hope you found that useful um let's move on and um i'll be back with something else very soon so um if you are interested in all this kind of uh how to write music film scoring music business or those things why don't you check out thinkspaceeducation.com because we teach people all this kind of stuff and it comes from the frontline you know it comes from people like me who do this for a living trying to help people like you get your head around how to do stuff and you know whether you're just going for one of our little short courses learning music theory or how to write music or going for a full master's degree you know it's all supported by professional people and uh you know producing stuff to help people like you get better so subscribe to the channel if you haven't already done so and i look forward very much to seeing you again soon bye

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 20,230

Keywords: thinkspace, education, music, film, scoring, games, television, composition, composer, guy michelmore, guy, michelmore, thinkspace education, audiomovers listen to plugin, zoom settings, zoom for music teachers, zoom music mode, zoom settings for music performance, zoom settings for live music, zoom settings for music lessons, listento, audiomovers, music education, zoom music lessons, loopback, vb-audio, voicemeeter, cubase, logic, virtual audio routing, Rogue Amoeba

Id: 6KoTZjKKaPQ

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021