Highest quality audio you can download with pro account?

[davedelizza]

Hi, i feel like i have all the quality settings maxed out, but i'm still only getting 32khz files. Is there a higher quality download, maybe 44.1 or something like that with a pro account? The account tested was a pro, i just don't know if i was missing some setting.

They came out separate and were synced just fine but i was hoping there would be a little higher quality download option. It's for a podcast, and I got drop kits with good microphones, so i'm trying to really maximize. Thanks!

[Ray_Harwood]

Audio quality – like video quality – depends on a number of factors. I think the biggest two factors are source quality and network throughput. 

To get the best source quality from the remote (and local) Zoom participants, the sender should be using Original sound. See this Zoom Support article for details.

Also helpful is to  check sound with this process. It doesn’t check everything, but does eliminate some potential issues.

 Finally, look at the Audio portion of the Statistics tab of your Zoom Settings tab – you’re likely not recording sound better than what is indicated as being received. 

[davedelizza]

Ray, thanks for the tips. Looks like I already had the max settings for all that. It's still 32k, which i guess it what it is, I can live with it. Just did a test run today and i wanted to run something by you. I attached a screen shot of the resulting documents.

The video recording, and the audio files that are NOT the individuals came out fine, audio wise, but they're just joined. When I checked the folder for the separate audio recordings, they're playing back very glitchy. I tried switch sample rates, it's not that though. It sounds like a glitchy time stretch/sample conversion issue, but i played it on a bunch of different players also. Any ideas?

I actually just did a check, and my file is correct. It seems only the remote file recorded that way. and not even all of them, just the one that was on the good microphone. I'm wondering if there's a setting that we've checked that tweaked it.

[Ray_Harwood]

@davedelizza – very interesting. Looks like you’re on a Mac, yes?  I’ve got a Mac, but not my usual device.

 I’ve had occasional issues with audio and video, and find that my Adobe products (Premiere Pro for video and Audition for audio) seem to always “play well”. I’ve just come off of a 3,5 day event … when I’ve got my brain back in gear, I’ll run a couple of tests with both Windows and Mac and see if I find anything helpful.

 In the meantime, if you could describe the full “audio chain” of  one or more of the problematic attendees/recordings. Example audio chain: I’ve got a Zoom MD-1 mic into a RodeCaster Pro, over USB into the PC, directly into Zoom’s Mic input, with Original Sound On.

 More soon …

[davedelizza]

Hey man, yea i know the gear hangover all too well.

So the chain is incredibly simple, Shure MV7, USB into a mac. That was the one that didn't come out, the other three (Me on the mv7 and two others on computer audio) were fine.

Here's the more unsettling part...I just did a new meeting, same other participant just me and him and did a short recording and downloaded it...played back individual audio just fine. No setting changes, nothing. That is always more unsettling than it just not working. I haven't played these files back yet in audition, but i played them back from quick look and from VLC and TwistedWave, all capable players and the results were the same on each. Vexing.

EDIT: Follow up...so that's definitely not in the playback on my end, i pulled it up in RX and it's baked into the file, you can see the jitter

[Ray_Harwood]

@davedelizza --

So I did a quick test meeting with only my PC as host and the Mac as a participant.  The PC being fed from the RodeCaster has Original Sound On, and the Mac has a simple USB headset with attached Mic, each fed into a separate 3mm jack, and those feed one USB A into the Mac (a late 2014 Mac Mini running Sierra with 8GB RAM) running Zoom

5.10.14.  Here's that the statistics tab of the settings panel reads:

This is "normal" for me, and the same view on the Mac is almost identical (minor differences in Latency and Jitter).  Most systems feed 24Khz audio, except Original Sound creates 2-channel stereo with 48Khz.  That's not the only configuration I've seen, but anything other than that is extremely rare, and almost always seems to involve some sort of extra complicated interface hardware and/or software that isn't set for 24K mono or 48K stereo.

Zoom also can grab any of the channels from my Rodecaster at 48K stereo using the ASIO interface.  Haven't had any issues when I use that.

Is the other end (the source) also a Mac?  No chance they're also running through OBS or something?  That's about all I can think of where I've heard occasional issues... and nothing really consistent like you're seeing.

I look at the Statistics panel "often"... and rush to it any time I see any issues with audio or video.  I'll tell you the real bandwidth-killer situation I've seen way too often: someone with a 4K monitor screen sharing.  Zoom shares Screen Sharing at native (source) resolution!  If you have any screen sharing going on and you want good audio... pick one or the other.

I recommend setting up Original Sound whenever possible (for experienced Zoom folks, not for the casual Zoomer): https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Using-and-preserving-original-sound-in-a-meet...,

Also note that Zoom can go peer-to-peer if only 2 machines are involved.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360061410851-Enabling-Peer-to-Peer-connection-for-2-people... 

[davedelizza]

Thanks for the time. Looks good. In this particular case, they were both macs with a USB mic directly connected. The first run through had a couple other people on, the second was much shorter and just us. My settings for original sounds are all the same as yours, and I can’t really guarantee what type of OS each participant will have. Truthfully, a platform like a Riverside is really the right tool for this but the government agency I work for was originally going for it and then balked. Do you happen to know, when doing a local recording, where the remote file originate from? Like I’m trying to figure out where the bad encoding would have happened, on his end, or on my end when it finally went for conversion.

[Ray_Harwood]

This is my understanding from "close observation"... I have no specific documentation to confirm any of this.  😎

The Zoom app collects received audio and video into a single kludged up file that has everything jumbled "neatly" together... to make it efficient for recording linearly into one file.  Then, when it's over, there's a process I'm sure you've seen that launches... and that process pulls apart and sorts everything in the file and re-encodes the resulting video, inserts the silence in the individual audios, and puts all of this in the correct files as needed.

I believe that the same process likely occurs for Cloud recordings: data is streamed into a single file, and after the event is over is "processed" into the resulting multiple views, audios, and text files.