Zoom Adding Advanced Audio for Professional Musicians

And music teachers everywhere rejoiced! New audio features coming from Zoom soon. Read the linked article below for more…

Teachers: Top Features for Securing Your Virtual Classrooms & Enhancing Students’ Learning Experiences:

Performing arts and music teachers — enjoy crystal-clear, professional-grade sound for your virtual lessons and performances. This option in Advanced Audio will enhance “Original Sound” mode, allowing you to disable echo cancellation and post-processing and get rid of compression. Not to get too into the weeds, but this setting will also raise audio codec quality from 22kHz to 48kHz, 96Kbps mono/192Kbps stereo for professional audio transmission in music education and performance applications. 

Note: This mode will require a professional audio interface, microphone, and headphones to allow you to offer high-quality private lessons. You will also be able to stream group performances from the same physical location — with higher-quality audio than most streaming platforms!

Look out for more information as we roll these features out through the end of August and September.

🔗 Longplay - New Music App That Prioritizes Listening and Organizing by Album

If you prioritize your music listening by albums instead of individual songs and playlists, Longplay is an app worth checking out. Link and quote below:

Introducing Longplay - Adrian's Corner:

Longplay is a music player for anyone who enjoy listening to entire albums start-to-finish. It digs through your Apple Music or iTunes library – that might have grown over the years or decades and is full of a mix of individual songs, partial albums, complete albums and playlists – to identify just those complete albums and gives you quick access to play them.

It provides a beautiful view of all your album artwork, and let’s you explore your albums (or playlists) by various sort options. A unique one is Negligence which combines how highly you’ve ranked an album and when you last listened it, to let you rediscover forgotten favourites. Brightness sorts the albums by their primary colour for an interesting visual take on your albums collection.

You can hide albums or playlists that you don’t want to show up - useful for meditation or kids albums, or smart playlists that you use for doing house keeping.

For users who want to listen on specific AirPlay devices, such as multi-room audio systems or headphones, there’s a “Play on” feature that’s the quickest way to listen on the right device.

🔗 Google Plans to Eventually replace Duo with Meet

9to5Google reports…

Google plans to eventually replace Duo with Meet:

With classic Hangouts on the way out, Google today has two video calling apps. However, that is one too many for the company, and sources familiar with the matter tell us that Google Duo will eventually be replaced by Meet.

This would be so welcome, if true. I have used Google Meet, Google Hangouts, and Google Duo over the past five months. While their minor strengths and differences eventually became clear to me, there is simply no reason for the company to have three video chat apps, especially when Meet does everything the other two do.

Google Duo is an alternatively elegant way to do a 1:1 call, but I won’t miss it. Two less apps to install on my devices!

🔗 Adobe and Wordpress launch Google-backed .new shortcuts - 9to5Google

Cool new document creation shortcuts from Wordpress and Adobe, in collaboration with Google. If you are a Google Docs user and didn't already know about document creation shortcuts, they will save you some time. Click to read the entire article below.

Adobe and Wordpress launch Google-backed .new shortcuts - 9to5Google:

Back in 2018, Google introduced web links to quickly open blank Docs, Forms, and Sheets. Over the years, it expanded to most other G Suite services, with Adobe Acrobat and Spark now supporting several .new shortcuts.

Adobe “collaborated” with Google in hopes of providing a “streamlined way to get things done.” It specifically doesn’t want users to be “stuck scouring the web just to get things done.”

I wish I had more of a need for these. I love the idea of typing "new.sheets" into my browser to set up a new spreadsheet, but I am logged into two different Google accounts and the chance that it creates the document in the correct account is 50/50. Kind of defeats the point of the shortcut.

Teaching Music Online During the Pandemic - Video Now Online for Anyone to Watch

The panel discussion I participated in, Teaching Music Online During the Pandemic, is now available on YouTube for anyone to watch.

Lots of ideas here, both inspiring and practical. Thanks to Katie Wardrobe of Midnight Music for hosting this video on her YouTube account.

🔗 Darcy James Argue on Spotify, Artist Compensation, and User-Centric Payment System's

I hesitate to post links to content on Facebook, but Darcy James Argue wrote an excellent post on his Facebook page regarding Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek's, recent claim that musicians may no longer be able to release music only "once every three to four years."

Excerpt below. Read the entire post here.

There’s been a lot of talk about Daniel Ek telling the artists whose creative work has made him a multi-billionaire that if we want to be paid a living wage, we just need to “work harder.” It’s infuriating, of course, but whenever this conversation comes up, people also tend to be extremely defeatist — yes, Spotify is horrible for artists, but it’s also the future, so what are you going to to do? Well, there are actually a lot of things you can do, including supporting the artists you care about directly by purchasing their music via Bandcamp and supporting the crowdfunding campaigns that allow them to actually make records. But even within the streaming world, there’s a model that is much more equitable than Spotify’s. It’s called a User-Centric Payment System, and essentially what it does is make sure the money that you pay for your monthly subscription fee actually goes to the artists you listen to.

By the way, if you are not familiar with the music of Darcy James Argue, get on it! Brooklyn Babylon is one of the most astounding records I have heard in the past 10 years.

Learn OmniFocus Workflow Guest: October 3, 2020

I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining Learn OmniFocus as a Workflow Guest on October 3rd, 2020.

Learn OmniFocus is a website dedicated to helping others live a fulfilling and productive life with OmniFocus, complementary productivity apps, and services.

You can learn a ton from their free resources, including basics like organizing tasks into projects and assigning tags to them. They also have information on advanced features like project templating and automation.

My session will be all about how I use OmniFocus and complementary productivity apps to keep my life as a teacher and musician together. Here is the session description:

Teacher, musician, and technologist, Robby Burns will be joining us from Ellicott City, Maryland to share how he uses OmniFocus and complementary productivity apps to keep his active life on track.

Robby has been using OmniFocus since 2010. He has a long history with Apple technologies and was originally drawn to OmniFocus’ deep integration with Apple’s operating systems. He especially appreciates that the Omni Group is quick to add support for new Apple technologies.

During the LIVE session, Robby will share details of his OmniFocus setup and workflows, including:

• How and when he uses OmniFocus on his iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Adjustments that he’s made to his use of OmniFocus and complementary productivity apps since switching from in-person to virtual teaching.

• His strategy for using tags.

• How he uses the Forecast perspective to keep his calendar lined up with his commitments.

• How he uses defer dates to relieve the stress of seeing too many things at once.

• Custom perspectives that help him hone in on his most important tasks, including his “Top 3” perspective that narrows his focus to only three items.

• How he creates OmniFocus projects based on templates stored in Drafts.

Read more and register here. The session will have a live Q/A and members can interact and share ideas. I hope to see you there!

You can become a member of Learn OmniFocus here. They have educator and student discounts. It is worth checking out if you wish to be more productive!

A free recording of the video will be made available to everyone by October 10.

Music Diet, August 2020

An assortment of albums I have been listening to this month, so far...

Clear Line | Jacob Garchik

Symphonie Pacifique | Greg Foat

RoundAgain | Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Brian Blade

Jennifer Higdon Harp Concerto - American Rapture | Yolanda Kondonassis, The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra & Ward

Some recently listened music in my Apple Music.

My Online Teaching Setup (High-Tech Edition)

My studio computer and associated hardware.

When school let out in March, I wrote My Very Straightforward and Very Successful Setup for Teaching Virtual Private Lessons. The impetus for this post, and its snarky title, was an overwhelming number of teachers I saw on Facebook fussing about what apps and hardware they should use to teach online when all you really need is a smartphone, FaceTime, and maybe a tripod.

I stand by that post. But there are also reasons to go high-tech. I have had a lot of time this summer to reflect on the coming fall teaching semester. I have been experimenting with software and hardware solutions that are going to make my classes way more engaging.

Zoom

I have been hesitant about Zoom. I still have reservations about their software. Yet, it is hard to resist how customizable their desktop version is. I will be using Google Meet for my public school classes in September, but for my private lessons, I have been taking advantage of Zoom’s detailed features and settings.

For example, it’s easier to manage audio ins and outs. Right from the chat window, I can change if my voice input is going through my Mac's internal microphone or my studio microphone, or if video is coming from my laptop webcam or my external Logitech webcam. This will also be useful for routing audio from apps into the call (we will get to that in a moment).

Zoom allows you to choose the audio/video input from right within the call.

Zoom also allows you to AirPlay the screen of an iOS device to the student as a screen sharing option. This is the main reason I have been experimenting with Zoom. Providing musical feedback is challenging over an internet-connected video call. Speaking slowly helps to convey thoughts accurately, but it helps a lot more when I say “start at measure 32” and the student sees me circle the spot I want them to start in the music, right on their phone.

You can get really detailed by zooming in and out of scores and annotating as little as a single note. If you are wondering, I am doing all of this on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, using the forScore app. A tight feedback loop of “student performance—>teacher feedback—>student adjustment” is so important to good teaching, and a lot of it is lost during online lessons. It helps to get some of it back through the clarity and engagement of annotated sheet music.

Selecting AirPlay as a screen sharing option.

AirPlaying annotated sheet music to the Zoom call using the iPad Pro and forScore app.

As much as I love this, I still think Zoom is pretty student hostile, particularly with the audio settings. Computers already try to normalize audio by taking extreme louds and compressing them. Given that my private lessons are on percussion instruments, this is very bad. Zoom is the worst at it of all the video apps I have used. To make it better, you have to turn on an option in the audio settings called “Use Original Audio” so that the host hears the student’s raw sound, not Zoom’s attempt to even it out. Some of my students report that they have to re-choose this option in the “Meeting Settings” of each new Zoom call.

If this experiment turns out to be worth it for the sheet music streaming, I will deal with it. But this is one of the reasons why I have been using simple apps like FaceTime up until this point.

My Zoom audio settings.

My Zoom advanced audio settings.

Sending App Audio Directly to the Call

I have been experimenting with a few apps by Rogue Amoeba that give me more control over how audio is flowing throughout my hardware and software.

Last Spring, I would often play my public school students YouTube videos, concert band recordings from Apple Music, and warm-up play-alongs that were embedded in Keynote slides. I was achieving this by having the sound of these sources come out of my computer speakers and right back into the microphone of my laptop. It actually works. But not for everyone. And not well.

Loopback is an app by Rogue Amoeba that allows you to combine the audio input and output of your various microphones, speakers, and apps, into new single audio devices that can be recognized by the system. I wrote about it here. My current set up includes a new audio device I created with Loopback which combines my audio interface and a bunch of frequently used audio apps into one. The resulting device is called Interface+Apps. If I select it as the input in my computer’s sound settings, then my students hear those apps and any microphone plugged into my audio interface directly. The audio quality of my apps is therefore more pure and direct, and there is no risk of getting an echo or feedback effect from my microphone picking up my computer speaker’s sound.

A Loopback device I created which combines the audio output of many apps with my audio interface into a new, compound device called “Interface+Apps.”

I can select this compound device from my Mac’s Sound settings.

Now I can do the following with a much higher level of quality...

• Run a play-along band track and have a private student drum along
• Play examples of professional bands for my band class on YouTube
• Run Keynote slides that contain beats, tuning drones, and other play-along/reference tracks
• and...

Logic Pro X

Logic Pro X is one of my apps routing through to the call via Loopback. I have a MIDI keyboard plugged into my audio interface and a Roland Octopad electronic drum pad that is plugged in as an audio source (though it can be used as a MIDI source too).

The sounds on the Roland Octopad are pretty authentic. I have hi-hat and bass drum foot pedal triggers so I can play it naturally. So in Logic, I start with an audio track that is monitoring the Octopad, and a software instrument track that is set to a piano (or marimba or xylophone, whatever is relevant). This way, I can model drum set or mallet parts for students quickly without leaving my desk. The audio I produce in Logic is routed through Loopback directly into the call. My students say the drum set, in particular, sounds way better in some instances than the quality of real instruments over internet-connected calls. Isn’t that something...

Multiple Camera Angles

Obviously, there is a reason I have previously recommended a set up as simple as a smartphone and a tripod stand. Smartphones are very portable and convenient. And simple smartphone apps like FaceTime and Google Duo make a lot of good default choices about how to handle audio without the fiddly settings some of the more established “voice conference” platforms are known for.

Furthermore, I can’t pick up my desk and move it to my timpani or marimba if I need to model something. So I have begun experimenting with multiple camera angles. I bought a webcam back in March (it finally just shipped). I can use this as a secondary camera to my laptop’s camera (Command+Shift+N in Zoom to change cameras).

Alternatively, I can share my iPhone screen via AirPlay and turn on the camera app. Now I can get up from my desk and go wherever I need to. The student sees me wherever I go. This option is sometimes laggy.

Alternatively, I can log in to the call separately on the iPhone and Mac. This way, there are two instances of me, and if I need to, I can mute the studio desk microphone, and use the phone microphone so that students can hear me wherever I go. I like this option the best because it has the added benefit of showing me what meeting participants see in Zoom.

Logging in to the Zoom call on the Mac and iPhone gives me two different camera angles.

SoundSource

This process works well once it is set up. But it does take some fiddling around with audio ins and outs to get it right. SoundSource is another app by Rogue Amoeba that takes some of the fiddly-ness out of the equation. It replaces the sound options in your Mac’s menubar, offering your more control and more ease at the same time.

This app is seriously great.

This app saved me from digging into the audio settings of my computer numerous times. In addition to putting audio device selection at a more surface level, it also lets you control the individual volume level of each app, apply audio effects to your apps, and more. One thing I do with it regularly is turn down the volume of just the Zoom app when my students play xylophone.

Rogue Amoeba's apps will cost you, but they are worth it for those who want more audio control on the Mac. Make sure you take advantage of their educator discount.

EDIT: My teaching set up now includes the use of OBS and an Elago Stream Deck. Read more here.

Conclusion

I went a little overboard here. If this is overwhelming to you, don't get the idea that you need to do it all. Anyone of these tweaks will advance your setup and teaching.

This post is not specific about the hardware I use. If you care about the brands and models of my gear, check out My Favorite Technology to read more about the specific audio equipment in my setup.

Sound Expertise: A Podcast from Musicologist, Will Robin

Will Robin, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland’s School of Music, has a new podcast called Sound Expertise. It’s a platform for music scholars to talk about their research.

I have really been enjoying this show. It manages to go very deep, while remaining brief and accessible at the same time. I am talking about how the show can address systemic racism in music schools, and define the qualities of timbre that characterize “1980s” music, all while remaining around 45 minutes per episode.

And when I say accessible, I mean that I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to recommend it to someone outside of the field of music.

Will is striking a really good balance with this show and I am learning new things each episode. Be sure to check it out!

You can subscribe with these links: Apple Podcasts; Stitcher; Spotify