Zoom, etc, qaulity.

[jgh]

I've done a couple of trial Zoom meetings in the last couple of weeks, and the main thing I've noticed is how unusable it is. It goes out of its way to make itself difficult to use.

There's no window furniture, there's no toolbar, it is an exemplar of unusability.

There's something in Fred's window, so I want to expand Fred's window so I can see what's there. Double-click it? Nope. No window furniture, so no Maximise button. Menu click? No, nothing there, just "Chat". Toolbar? No. General menu click? Nothing. Ooh, what happened then? I've expanded Fred's window. How did I do that?

Clicky clicky. Ooh, another option has appeared on the context menu.

ARR45GAH11!!"

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER have options that don't appear until something else is done. If it's only valid in a particular circumastance, then have it there, but indicate that it can't yet be used, such as by "greying" it out. Otherwise, you are just saying FUCK YOU!!!! to your users by making it impossible to explore and find out what the controls are.

Ok, Rant Number One over. Hmmm "Pin video". I don't want to do anything with any videos, and I don't want to pin something, that is, hide something away for later use by, eg, putting a tiny representation of it on the desktop.

Randomly click on Pin Video. Ehh??? It's maximised the window. THAT'S NOT "PIN"!!!!!! THAT'S "SELECT" OR "MAXIMISE". "PIN" is "I don't want this for the moment, chuck it away somewhere where I can fetch it from later when I do want it.

Ok, Moron programmers are illiterate morons. Film At Ten.

Hmm. Bob's saying something interesting. Ok, Menu and, sigh! "pin video". Eh? There's no "Pin Video" option. Just as I've found how to maximise a window it disappears. WTF? Rant Two: don't randomly change the controls without giving any indication why or how it's changed and no way to unchanged them.

What? Without me doing anything, the whole screen has changed to Jim's window. I don't want that, close it. No close button. Minimise it. No minimise button. HTF do I get rid of this? I want to go back to seeing everybody, not the innards of Jim's nostrils.

Ah. Jim has forced himself on all viewers, *I* can't do anything until *JIM* allows me to. Sorry, FUCK. OFF. This is *MY* computer and *I* will chose what *I* am watching.

On the whole, a giant crock of shit, and the lamp-posts are waiting.

[Roger Hayter]

Yes I am confused. It is the dynamic ones that can have a very low output because capacitor ones tend to have built in amplifiers. But it is irrelevant because the OP says he was using a pre-amp. Something is broken in his setup, I suppose.

[Andy Burns]

Roger Hayter wrote

tried each mono channel of the interface, two different mics, two different xlr leads, it's not as though there was silence, just endless complaints (regardless of how much pre-amp I used) that I sounded "too quiet".

[The Natural Philosopher]

What is probably going on is that any AGC (automatic gain control) is working on a different band of frequencies to human perception of 'loudness'.

Male voice has a lot of energy on the sub 300hz region which adds nothing to intelligibility and is exacerbated by good microphones especially up close.

A cheap electret mic a foot away wont really pick that up at all.

When I designed disco mixers, we used to roll off the bass on the microphone channel from around 400Hz to compensate for that and the fact that the bozos always turned the bass up anyway.

[Dave W]

I share your pain after my first encounter with Zoom last week. There are several options for displaying the participants, but as you say, no instructions.

You can have one big picture filling the screen, one biggish picture with the others all in a strip above, or you can have 'gallery' mode where everybody has the same sized picture. In the first modes, whoever is speaking appears in the big picture. In the gallery mode, a yellow frame appears round the one speaking. The mode is selected by icons at top right of screen, which I think only appear if you hover the cursor there.

My host wanted to demonstrate the possibility of showing a PowerPoint presentation on the whole screen, and the participants photos were confined to a column of thumbnails. I had to be told by the host that I could drag the column to a different part of the screen so that I could see the words behind. At the top of the column were three icons consisting of a thin horizontal line, a thick line, and two thick lines. These had the effect of minimising the column, showing speaker only, and showing all, respectively.

We're going to try other conferencing programs to see which is best for us. The next one will be FreeConference, which allows up to 5 people free for unlimited time (but the host has to set the time period beforehand).

[Dave Plowman (News)]

At least at one time, there was a DIN standard for pro mics. So they all gave approximately the same level from the same source. Of course there will always be some mic makers who think the higher the output level, the better.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Most 'computer' mics have a severe degree of bass cut. If you use a nominally flat one, the AGC could be reacting to frequencies it doesn't expect to see?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

IIRC, you can only expand a window to full screen when the participant has been selected by the host to be 'live'. You get a yellow line under the thumbnail when this happens. If everyone could choose to have anyone full screen, it would take up a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

[Andy Burns]

That's two votes for that theory, I don't think I have any equalizer option, or AGC defeat, but will have a look

[spuorgelgoog]

Both local councils here have banned Zoom because of security risks.

Owain

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Have you got an external mixer or second computer to EQ your mic? A steep high pass might sort things.

(Not sure you could EQ the mic within the same computer and present that output as the computer mic)

No surprise you can't defeat the AGC. Given you can't actually hear your mic in a Zoom meeting etc as others hear it.

It's a thing I hate on Zoom when wearing a headset. In broadcast, we tended to provide a bleed of that mic into your own headphones. Stops the tendency to shout. But near impossible with so much latency in the system.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Hope they don't use phones either, then. ;-)

[Dave Liquorice]

What no abilty to locally mix the mic onto the headphones?

[Paul]

I did a recording the other day in Windows 10, and I could swear the audio from the webcam was being

*ruined* by echo suppression. In short, the sound was terrible, and I had to turn up the volume too much (implying I was amplifying the "leakage" that got through the echo suppression effect).

I noticed this too, with my nice analog microphone, the one with the line level (~1V output). I was having to turn the volume up too much, unlike previous tests in older OSes.

And it isn't exactly echo suppression, because if I hold the microphone close enough to the speakers, it'll howl with feedback.

I don't have a test plan yet, as to how I'll figure out what this "effect" is supposed to be. It's possible the effect is present even when an application is not using the microphone. I'm getting some "feedthru", with the microphone input ending up on LineOut. I don't remember that being part of the acoustic model for Windows.

I suppose I should have flipped over to Linux and retested, to see if I could get a "clean" situation to verify everything works normally there. But even Linux has its problems - Using Ubuntu 2004LTS, I had the camera disappear on me, and even when cleaning out .config, I couldn't get it to work properly afterwards. Something other than homedir configuration files, prevents successful webcam usage... after a reboot even.

The conclusion so far is "this stuff used to work..." Today, not so much.

Paul

[Andy Burns]

I tried turning off all the windows "enhancements" such as ech suppression, keyboard click removal, beam-forming, far-field pickup etc.

[Andy Burns]

That is one thing the behringher interface would allow, if I could use a mic into it.

I might have a look at

which is a free sound driver plug-in that allows e.g. high-pass filters as some have suggested

[Martin Brown]

You don't give any indication of what your link speed to the internet is, but mine is a poxy 5Mpbs and that will just about support full HD live streaming with the occasional breakup of voice but most aggro is caused by inexperienced people typing whilst using a laptops built in mike or background noises off.

One mystery I have yet to fully understand is that every now and then a random wiggly doodle in a primary colour usually green or red appears on the shared screen to the mystification of the speaker. Looks like someone's randomish mouse movements being shared with all and sundry.

Sometimes they vanish again and other times they persist until the end.

I have seen some pretty poxy webcams at the far end. Most often though blasts of radio or TV in Zoom events where the host has unwisely unmuted all participants and there are many including novices online at once.

The uplink speed ~1Mbps limits the video quality I can send back but since it is only used as a thumbnail it hardly matters. The downlink is more than adequate for a full HD presentation - although mostly of static images being talked about rather then live action sports video.

[AnthonyL]

My first Zoom last week, a bit hasty as we'd started off with Teams but that was awful and so "let's switch to Zoom". Alright for those who already had it. I'd only just found out that afternoon that my webcam worked on my Linux install!

Surprisingly, both Teams and Zoom worked on Ubuntu. But the one of the Zoom members decided to run a picture quiz. Silly me, I focussed on them thinking they'd show a picture. No, of course, they shared a screen I worked out afterwards so I missed the whole thing!

My conclusion at the end, click on everything, left click, right click, double click - something will work. No doubt there's a YouTube video out there to help.

Oh and some users were able to have imaginative backgrounds, never worked out how to do that.

[AnthonyL]

Perhaps they have not understood what the risks were/are? Anyhow as per my other post when I connected I noted that it said "Using a server in Europe". Not sure if that was meant to re-assure or not, or even if it was true.

[Chris B]

Fairly easy on the windows version (settings >virtual background) but not yet possible on the android app, so may not be possible on the Linux version.