How can I boost/reduce volume for specific participants

[GemT]

when I'm watching a discussion between 2 or 3 participants, it would be really good to be able to level up their audio on my view, either automatically, or manually: Boost someone who is really quiet or quieten the noisy one that makes the quiet one hard to hear.

Is there any way for a viewer to assign local volume levels to individual participants?

Or maybe there are host options to do it for everyone?

[Bort]

Hi @GemT 

Unfortunately, there is no way to adjust individual volume levels for different participants in a meeting. I can control the volume of my audio going into Zoom, but participants listing to me can only control the overall volume of all audio coming out of Zoom. 

If you would like to submit any product feedback, I encourage you to visit our Zoom Feedback form, which is the official way to share any feedback or feature requests with the Zoom team. Thanks!

[courtreporter]

I wish that would change.  I'm a court reporter and we do a lot of stuff on Zoom nowadays.  It'd be helpful for us during back-and-forth testimony. 

[marxelini]

Even discord has this, how come zoom is so many years behind other videoconference apps

[Rupert]

Hi @GemT 

@Bort  is correct - there is no way to do this at your end. At least not easily.

But there are some thing that can help:

It can be helpful to encourage everyone else to enable "Automatically adjust microphone level" in Zoom at their end.

Encourage everyone to stay Muted when not speaking. The Host can also Mute people who are not speaking, but who may be creating noise into the Meeting.

Encourage everyone to at least wear headphones - and preferably a headset with a microphone. 

For important meetings, and if you are the Host, it can help helpful to have everyone join a few minutes early then  quickly go around the room and do some "mic-checks". Just have each person speak briefly and put one person in charge of asking them to adjust their microphone up or down, to find a happy balance. Keep everyone else Muted while each person speaks.

It may be also worth noting that if you record the Meeting locally, you can have separated audio recoding files for each participant - which you could normalize if you were dealing with a Post-Production scenario.

There is also a way with Zoom Rooms to get isolated audio feeds for each participant, but it is not a trivial pursuit. 

Hope this helps.

Rupert

[mdiamondstone]

Hey Rupert - can you cite a source or provide more information on getting isolated audio feeds for each participant?

[Rupert]

Hi @mdiamondstone 

Sure.

For a post-production workflow, you can get isolated audio recordings for each participant by recording locally, using the Zoom client, and enabling "Record a sperate audio file for each participant" in Settings > Recording. In the latest versions of Zoom, these files are time-aligned - which is nice (they didn't used to be).

For live-production, taking contributions in from Zoom and capturing or presenting externally, you can use Zoom Rooms with NDI output. Each NDI feed (up to three, per Room) will provide isolated video and audio for each pinned participant. You can then take these feeds into a software mixer and mix them any way you want.

https://youtu.be/VQlVcwNoKdM?t=3962

[mdiamondstone]

thank you Rupert!

[Rupert]

You're welcome.

Also - feel free to join "Office Hours" every day on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/844989302 for all kinds of help and discussion around Zoom, video, media and virtual and production. An expert panel answer questions live, on almost any technical subject.

More info at https://officehours.global/schedule/

Note: Office Hours is an external community, not unaffiliated with Zoom - but does contain Zoom experts and specialists.

Past meetings are back-cataloged here:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS2NeR7i1YWiaxZDX7ihFyA

[Agastya_123]

Hi @GemT  

I'm sorry but there is no option for controlling individual participant's volume

[jamiejamie]

This feature would be so valuable. There is always someone quieter and others louder... make the whole experience difficult. Would love to just have a volume adjustment under the "..." menu for each video feed.

[pbristow]

Part of the issue here is that perceptions of "too loud" or "too quiet" are personal/individual. Even if Zoom introduced a platform-wide level-matching system (which *CAN* work, and might well be a good idea: The BBC successfully imposed audio-level standards across their entire TV broadcast network as far back as the late '60s/early '70s, which met the needs of well over 90% of their users/viewers!), then some individual user would still want to tinker to get things more comfortable *for them*.

I think that Zoom's response to this should be two-fold:
(1) Intoroduce a a common reference audio-level standard, and enable & encourage Zoomers to stick to it;
(2) Enable Individual Zoomers to fine-tune audio levels and/or frequency response to suit their own hearing.
...
(And maybe also (3): Educate Zoomers about frequency response/balance/"tone controls", and how to adjust them for a better end-user experience!)

[Scottddot]

Hi I'm Scott zoom me see how it works k 

[ALREADYREGISTER]

Hello. I am a trained video audio production person (BFA and MFA is in film/video and I grew up in the industry). The best way to handle this is to approach virtual gatherings such as those using Zoom as if they are a full video production where the output from all *mics (nickname for ‘microphone’) being used (that includes the mic built into the laptops of participants using ‘built in’ audio as well as any ‘room’ mics) are sent to an audio mixer where someone (technically called an ‘audio engineer’) monitors and ‘mixes’ the entire audio mix together as desired and as it is happening and that ‘mix’ is what is sent out to attendees. Summary: the way this is solved is by modeling a Zoom based event on that of a film or video production where we use an audio ‘mixer’ to mix all of the outputs of all mics (as well as any other ‘transducers’ such as a line out from some background music). SUMMARY: Send all audio out through an audio mixer and ’cast’ the output from mixer. There are references and examples of doing this on YouTube. 

[chris29]

If Zoom could add general audio compression/make-up gain, I think it would help a lot.  

[chris29]

I'm distinguishing between audio compression and data compression; just so there is no confusion.