Thankful Thursday

[mdlbear]

Today I am grateful for...

• Curbside delivery.
• L', our amazing housekeeper (now mostly groundskeeper) and her minion A'.
• Jitsi (with recent updates) and Zoom.
• Gin. Have I mentioned gin lately?
• Reduced household expenses during lockdown.
• Being on a fixed income. For the first time in a long while, that's actually a good/em> thing.

Comments

[acelightning]

I need to pick somebody's brains about audio on things like Zoom and Skype. I tried to participate in a bardic circle, but even with the noise suppression turned off, it still squelched my attempts to sing along with someone else. Now these bardic circles are happening every month, and I really want to sing harmony with them!

[mdlbear]

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good way for two geographically-separated people to sing together in real-time. As far as I can tell, Zoom and probably most others simply try to identify the person speaking, and mute everybody else. The problem is the delay -- Bob can sing along with Alice, but what everyone else -- including Alice! -- is going to hear is Alice with Bob singing along several milliseconds later. It's worse if Bob is listening to Alice over speakers, because then people are going to hear Alice and delayed Alice mixed together, which leads to some weird interference effects. It's called flanging, if it's done deliberately. You sometimes hear flanging with just one person singing with a guitar; I've heard noise reduction blamed for it, but my personal guess is that it's at least partly the result of using speakers rather than headphones.

There _are_ a few programs that purport to let people sing together, but I've seen mixed reviews, and they're unlikely to work at all if people aren't located pretty close to one another.

There are a couple of ways to make it _sound_ like people are singing together, but that usually involves singing against a click track, singing with a conductor (both of which require recording everyone and mixing the result later -- I don't think there's any software out there that lets you mix multiple video streams in realtime) or adding layers -- Alice sings her part, Bob sings along and uses a second computer to mix his part with Alice's, and so on. So for N people you need 2N-1 computers.

Is that making sense? It got a little long.

There are two

[acelightning]

I really wish there were a way to set things up so that I could mix the audio - I did used to do that for a living. I'd also like a way to have someone (even me) be the video switcher for the multiple cameras involved in a video group like that. I'm fairly certain that the major TV stations have these capabilities, because I often see little glitches in the switching on broadcast TV news ("And now over to Susan Gonzalez at Central General Hospital... uh, Susan?")

I found myself watching a YouTube video of Lukas and Micah Nelson (two of Willie's kids) singing and playing Hank Williams' "I Saw the Light". It's really easy to fake an alto part to that, and I was singing so loud that my thermos started to vibrate.

[madfilkentist]

Is Jitsi Meet more reliable now? I haven't seen an update to the iPad app since my disastrous experience during RainbowCouchCon.

[mdlbear]

It seemed to work okay for the last EuroFilk. I'm pretty sure there were fewer people, and I'm also pretty sure more of them had used it before. The no-host UI means that a stray click can cause havoc, and you get race conditions with the host and the next singer trying to unmute and having it cancel out. I believe there was an update since RainbowCouch that made it work better on Firefox.

That said, Zoom still appears to be more stable, and it's fun to play with backgrounds. Jitsi is still better if you want long meetings and don't want to shell out $14/month/host.

[amaebi]

I think I'm hearing a little more energy than usual? If so, I'm very grateful for that: I am always wishing you well.

[mdlbear]

Thanks! I always appreciate your comments

I'm not so sure about the energy. Definitely fewer back problems, which I attribute to the exercises I got in physical therapy earlier in the year. Probably losing ground psychologically.

[amaebi]

:/