Video-conferencing alternatives?

[marcwhy]

Most of my students are in person, but I have a couple who are "online;" I'm familiar with and have used Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and Skype back in the day. I realize most (all?) have the "musician" setting so you can hear an amp, etc.; however, I've had some difficulties recently with a particular student's' connection -- although he has the system set for "musician," I barely hear him, and can't hear at all if he puts on a backing track to demo something. Quite frustrating, and we've gone back and forth to make sure all his settings are correct, and he has even used different mics. [and he hears me fine, BTW]

Any tips or other video-conferencing systems that are consistent??

Thanks for any help!

Marc

[djg]

zoom is the market leader. it is most stable platform out there. here are things you can try:

-the student should try LAN instead of WLAN.
-student should try to use mobile data.
-if everthing else fails, ditch the video and give audio lesson.

personally i use a different video platform, jitsi. but i have access to a server. you can either try and find a public jitsi server (universities often provide one) or rent a server yourself for a few bucks per month.

public servers:
ChaosPad V1.1: jitsiliste

video conferencing sometimes works via p2p when there are only two parties while switching to a server when there are more than two participants. i usually log in with two accounts on two different machines. one only for screen-sharing. so i actually have three users in the video conference whcih forces my jitsi to go server-side, which vastly improves quality.

some students do have shitty internet. not much you can do.

[Christian Miller]

Skype seems a bit better from my experience. Zoom was the best for a bit but the audio can be problematic for some reason, even with all the correct settings.


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[Alter]

Try to have them play the backing track on a different device, say a phone. What's a "musician" setting?

I also prefer Skype, usually it's better, and I like the windows more. With students try to have Skype, Viber and Zoom, or some social media like Facebook messenger etc ready as an alternative, so if something isn't working at a particular day you switch to another platform.

[Peter C]

Check something stupid like their mic input volume? I've read that switching off any Bluetooth devices that may be connected can help (assuming that no one's using this for live audio anyway as it sucks). I've been using G Meet for ages and it works great most of the time. Have never heard of "musician" setting.

[CliffR]

Of all the video conferencing software I've tried, I much prefer Zoom. One setting I noticed that was causing problems between myself and Christian was 'Background Noise Suppression'. With the default setting, it was basically making my guitar impossible for Christian to hear. I'd ask your student to set this to 'Low' and see if that helps. (It's under Settings/Audio/) - so, this would be Zoom background noise removal rather than either of the musician settings. That worked for me, at least, where I'm using my Mac's internal microphone and my guitar is coming through a couple of monitor speakers nearby.

[RJVB]

Re: jitsi: my musicschool insisted on using that back during the corona circus days. It worked but was quite frustrating as it only had that conferencing mode you also find in conference mic systems for conference rooms: whomever first produced sound after a silence would preempt all other mics. That means there was probably also a minimum level under which the mic wouldn't open. A sort of automatic "push to speak" button. Bandwidth reduction measures, plus they keep the audio clean if everyone is disciplined.

And this may be exactly what the music setting is about: just keep both/all mics open all the time and allow bidirectional audio transfer.

Your student has "different mics", but how decent are they? Can he plug in his guitar instead of a mic and does that improve matters?

[djg]

What's a "musician" setting?

better audio codec, no echo suppression. your device might still override some of these settings.

[marcwhy]

Excellent suggestions, everyone - thank you!

(And yes, noise suppression is the typical default on most of these, which blocks out ambient sounds ... like instruments! The musician setting turns this off.)

[fep]

I go microphone and direct guitar plugged into an audio interface then to Reaper linked to OBS Virtual Camera to Zoom. (I use the plugin ReaStream in Reaper and OBS and "Cable Output VB Virtual Cable" to make that work.)

In Reaper I have total control of my audio, I can use amp sims and other plugins, control the balance between my mic for talking and my guitar, I can also play midi keyboard controller, I can play a backing track, bass, etc.

I've been told the sound quality is excellent.

[Alter]

Also, if one needs to have a bigger audience, for seminars or group classes, or simply organize a whole series of lessons with everything online, Google Classroom is great. I 've done whole semesters online with 150+ students connected at a time without problems. Students would have their cameras off and would only turn them on for questions, playing etc, but they could all hear and see me fine, along with any videos/pages i would share. On lessons with smaller groups of 10-30 people we often had more cameras on.

[CliffR]

FWIW, I was using the musician setting in Zoom, but it started interfering with my work meetings, causing my voice to be barely audible to the others in the meetings. Maybe a bug, since I seem to remember a reset fixed it. At any rate, might be worth asking your student to switch it off just in case.

[reventlov]

I used to use skype and zoom extensively for one-to-one tutoring; these days, I've shifted all of that kind of work to Whereby - it's browser-based, easy to use, and it's never given me any problems in the 3 years or so I've been using it.

[RJVB]

it's browser-based

Aren't most of those apps nowadays - written in NodeJS and probably using Electron for the GUI?