Chrome Original Sound Extension by Marc Sabatella
We're the Skagit Valley Chorale, a large community choir in northwest Washington State. You may know us as the choir whose March 2020 rehearsal became one of the first widely reported COVID superspreader events. Since then we've been very serious about keeping singers who are ill away from rehearsals, especially now that the choir has grown to 135 voices. We use Zoom so singers who are ill or need to be remote can still take part. We chose Zoom over Google Meet because Meet won't record without raising our Google Workspace costs.
Like many performing-arts nonprofits, we've slowly adopted technology for our administration through Google Workspace for Nonprofits. Recently we've focused on improving the sound for remote attendees, who only listen and sing along at home with their audio and video muted. We also record rehearsals and post them to our YouTube channel so singers can review them later.
We currently stream rehearsals to Zoom from a personally owned Windows 11 computer using the desktop client with Original Sound for Musicians turned on. Two hanging condenser choir mics feed channels 1 and 2 of a Yamaha MG-series USB mixer. The director wears a Sennheiser wireless bodypack mic whose receiver goes into our P.A. (a powered mixer driving two speakers). The P.A.'s REC Out feeds stereo channel 5/6 on the Yamaha, so the director's voice reaches Zoom along with the choir. The Yamaha's built-in USB audio output is the computer's microphone input in Zoom. A USB webcam on a ring-light tripod provides video.
Because we're a large volunteer organization, we'd like to keep this setup as simple as possible and stop relying on a personally owned computer. Ideally the choir would own the computer. Since we're a Google Workspace organization, a higher-end Chromebook managed with a Chrome Enterprise license makes sense for us.
I tried a Chromebook Plus Spin 514 for the second half of our last rehearsal. The web client on the Chromebook didn't hold a candle to the desktop client we'd used on the Windows computer in the first half. Since then, I've learned about your extension.
Before we spend the time and money to buy a Chromebook for the choir, I'd like to ask a few questions:
- Are you still developing and maintaining the extension?
- Do you have a paid version planned, or some other way we could support your work?
- Would it be unwise to base our rehearsals on a free extension maintained by one person?
- Do you have any sense of whether Zoom plans to bring Original Sound to the web client?
Thanks so much for building this and sharing it with the community!
Eric Hall
Skagit Valley Chorale