I thought I should write out a few more stories about my time working on a Telepresense product, including software and audio and streaming media. I worked on that project for many years, and it gave us many opportunities to apply good engineering practices.
Continue readingTag Archives: audio
Basics of Echo Cancellation
There is some cool math and lots of advanced stuff going on in echo cancellation, but for this post I’ll just talk about some basic concepts and what you can do to make it work better if you ever need it.
Back when I worked on a telepresence product I got to play at being an audio engineer. Not that I was really great at it, but I got to work with some engineers who were really, really great at it, which made it fun and educational. So I want to write down a few things to share that I learned that may even be useful to remote workers trying to get the best out of their video conference sessions.
Continue readingMini rant – Do not use the mic on your laptop!
With Coronavirus forcing isolation, we are seeing a huge uptick in the number of remote interviews and broadcasts from home on TV. But please, people, do not use the cheap mic on your laptop and expect to have a good interview! I’ve seen many of these interviews where the boomy echo of the room is picked up by a mic attached to a laptop with an acoustically reflective screen and a built in fan. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. The latest I saw (not to get political) was from a Trump campaign social media expert criticizing the Biden campaign for taking so long to do online broadcasts, but Biden at least had enough setup to use real mics instead of a laptop mic as that guy was doing. 🙁
I need to do a longer post about acoustic and video setups at home and why some things are just never going to give a good experience.
Review – Sonic Pi
Been a while since I posted anything, so here is a quick one.
I finally got the notion to try out Sonic Pi. I was hoping it would be something I could get my two oldest kids in to so they would do some coding and make some music. But I struggled with the interface and language. I was wishing it was more like Scratch. Music is more visual to me, and notation with bars and notes is much better in my mind than three lines of non-intuitive text. Continue reading