Teaching Voice Lessons on Zoom

[aratcliffe]

Hello out there fellow musicians.

Does anyone have any advice about how to get a better sound quality for teaching music, voice specifically, on Zoom.

I fixed some of the audio settings, but am not there yet.  My student  (and me too!) still cuts out about half the time when sustaining notes for any length of time. Whatever help you can offer would be mostly appreciated.

Thank you,

Aratcliffe

[Bort]

Hi @aratcliffe 

I'd suggest enabling the High fidelity music mode in your client settings for both you and your clients. This setting raises the quality of the audio you are sending  to 48Khz, 96Kbps mono/192kbps stereo. 

Just be sure to enable original sound when in the meeting so that this quality is used for that session. 

Hope that helps and please make sure to mark the solution as accepted if this information is what you needed.

[aratcliffe]

Thank you, Bort,

I had enabled "High Fidelity Music Mode"  and it helped, just not all the way.  I don't understand what is meant by "Original Sound" on that screen and what exactly you mean by your penultimate advice.  Also, Is there a microphone I should hook up to the computer? 

Thanks very much for your help.

Armour (aratcliffe)

[Bort · Accepted solution]

Hi @aratcliffe 

Enabling Original Sound in the in-meeting settings disables a lot of noise suppression and echo cancellation, which often mistakes music for background noise. If you have High Fidelity Music mode enabled in settings, Original Sound will also take that feature into account and increase the audio quality. 

While we have no specific recommendations for microphones, a better microphone will allow for better audio to be captured for the meeting. They may capture a wider range of audio or have a better pattern of detecting audio. The Blue Snowball and Blue Yeti seem to be popular recommendations from what I can find online, and since they are both USB, they can be plugged in and quickly selected in the Zoom audio settings. 

[PierreG]

Hi Bort, my children are using chromebooks and original music option is not there. do you have suggestions how to go about this with zoom in chromebook? this is for music in online school

[Bort]

Hi @PierreG 

Unfortunately, Chromebooks are very limited in what they can achieve. I am not aware of a workaround for achieving the same audio quality through Zoom on a Chromebook. 

[PurplePianoCat]

It used to be that you’d turn on original sound by following the directions for the Zoom App, not the desktop.

[PurplePianoCat]

You need to download an app for original sound on Zoom. Go to the Google Play store. Here's the link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/original-sound/ffhniinhbjmjakiabdojmfehdhnbcmdh

Enjoy! Don't forget to turn it on! 😆 

[claudeman1]

Has anyone else had success or failures teaching voice lessons? I'm still working with my students and experiencing issues.