Any way of hooking audacity to Zoom Meetings?

As most of you may know, Zoom audio is hella crappy. Anyone able to hook it up to Zoom?

You can get around a lot of the distortions by letting Zoom do the capture and recording. They can even provide individual sound files for each contributor.

Get everybody in the conversation to wear headphones, earphones, or earbuds. All of the Zoom direction management, echo cancellation, and feedback processing distortion, gone. This one is a little magic because wearing headphones doesn’t benefit the performer wearing them at all. It’s so their voice arrives at the other end OK.

Perform from a quiet, echo-free room. That solves a lot of problems no matter what you’re trying to do. There is a Youtuber I can’t watch because his video is beautiful and perfect in every way, but he sounds like he’s recording in a bathroom.

Use an internet service that isn’t trying to throttle your service to make you upgrade. I was surprised how prevalent that is. I know people who are upgrading from Crazy-Fast Internet Service to Super Crazy-Fast-Internet service because their current service is exhibiting data damage, distortions, and dropped connections.

My service is a small fraction of that and I don’t get any of these problems.

So there you are. If you follow all those rules, it’s possible to get recordings that sound like four local studio recordings instead of ratty and spread out across the earth. Can’t do anything about the delays. Sorry. You’re stuck with the speed of light.

Koz

Were you looking for a way to record on one underpowered laptop? You don’t. Skype, Zoom and others take over your computer when they work and you don’t have anything to say about it.

You can do it with two computers. That’s how I did it.

The trick is to separate Skype and Zoom from the audio as quickly as possible.

Audio/Audacity on the left, Skype on the right.

https://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/clips/DenisePodcastVer5.mp3

Denise sounds like she’s sitting right beside me, right? She’s four time zones away.

We’re both wearing headphones.

Koz

The music was part of an engineering test which sucked. I wanted to see how close to a live show I could get. Not very close as it turned out. That was playback on the left-hand computer. It wasn’t being used for the actual podcast.

We’re ringers. We’re both broadcast professionals, and so know the rules, but still. We didn’t do anything you couldn’t do.

Koz