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Showing posts from August, 2017

High-quality audio conferencing

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I've tried a lot of videoconferencing programs, including Skype and Hangouts. They all have problems, the most important of which is the crappy sound quality. I was looking for a program that would allow me to make professional-sounding interviews through the Internet. Of course there's always the option of doing a double-ender , but that requires more logistics work and some technical ability on the part of your interviewee. I figured that in the age of broadband Internet, there must be an easy way to do live high-quality audio conferences. After considerable trial and error, I finally found what I was looking for: a videoconferencing program called  Linphone . Here's what makes it so great: It uses the Opus audio codec for amazing crystal-clear audio, far better than any other codec. Skype and Hangouts sound like crap compared to this. (Of course you also need a proper microphone and recording environment.) It allows easy recording in the native format (no tra

Near real-time microphone effects (amplify, pitch, etc.)

You can increase the gain from your microphone in (almost) real-time. $ sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-pulse pavucontrol $ pactl load-module module-null-sink $ sox -t pulseaudio alsa_input.usb-ZOOM_Corporation_H5_000000000000-00.multichannel-input -t pulseaudio null gain 30   Replace " alsa_input.usb-ZOOM_Corporation_H5_000000000000-00.multichannel-input" with your device, or simply default if you want to use your built-in mic. To find out the name of your input, use: $ pactl list   It will work for all kinds of other transformations, like changing the pitch of your voice: pitch -800