Why Not Skype?

[Village Idiot]

Alrighty, then. I'm off to Radio Shack to get a mic. If I get the wrong kind, Millring, I'll send you the bill.

[millring]

Imagining myself with a bill...

[dougyoung]

Bill mentioned skype to me while he was out last weekend, and I finally checked it out a few nights ago. Had a nice chat with Chak, then mentioned it to another long distance friend. Turns out he knew all about it already, and was regularly using it to keep in touch with his son who's away at college. So we tried the webcam thing last night. Interestingly, he never signed out afterwards, and an hour later, I noticed that I was still seeing the inside of his house in my viewer, empty room, mostly dark, after midnight at his place. Good thing there was nothing going on there I wasn't supposed to see :-) So I guess those fears could be real. Remember to sign off!

Chak and I tried out the web cam this morning, and other than a short period that seemed to be an internet glitch, it worked pretty well.

it doesn't seem to need much equipment, for sure. My setup lets me pick from the multiple audio ins and outs in my computer, and when I chatted with Chak the other night I just grabbed my recording mics that were already setup and put it over in front of me. So I was using a Schoeps condenser going thru a high end preamp, etc. Pretty silly, but that's what was connected. This morning I was just using the web cam mic, probably worth all of $1.99, and it seemed to work as well, if not better.

[theevan]

Okay, I'm on as well. I'm evanpyle on skype. I'm looking forward to the possibilities.

Our friends leave themselves on day and night. The French exchange student that stayed with us and later with them logs on most days. He loves the hustle and bustle there as he's an only child with a traveling father, while the Beards have 6 kids and home school. Occasionally they'll hear Philibert calling out to them a they pass by the 'puter. Funny stuff.

[timfarney]

You look good with a bill, John.

Tim

[iamjohnne]

Well, I know my stuff works, I just had a brief but live chat with Mr. Farney. This could be fun.

[theevan]

I was just skyping with chak, jeff.montana, johnne, doug young. It was a bit buggy. Chak opened with a nice arrangement, soulfully played of What a Friend We Have In Jesus in A. Douge followed with something, but the sound became unintelligible. Phooey. Then I dropped off & couldn't get back on. I was going to respond with my arrangement in C. I amazed at some of the similarities in feel if not in arrangement.

[lakeside]

Enjoyed hearing Chak and Doug. Although, Doug's really started breaking up on me. I've got to get my mic problems figured out, but that was a real hoot. Enjoyed it. I dropped out when the technical problems started arising, let some others in and have some fun. Nice talking to everyone and hope to do it again.

[Deleted]

uh. This sounds like too much fun to miss out on. Can someone tell me what kind of mic to get at Radio Shack? I have to wait till payday next week but it sounds great!

[chak]

Skype update for all....

I think we pushed the limits of Skype a bit today hence the technical issues mentioned above. At one point we may even have had 6 people on at the same time.

I spoke with John a bit and he's going to look into some other options for us, so stay tuned. If we can get some of these issues worked out, it could prove to a lot of fun. It wasn't successful today but it was a decent start.

Have to take care of some family things. I'll check back in later.

Chak

[Village Idiot]

Well, I got it downloaded, and was going to make the test call, and realized I can't find my mic. Has anyone seen it?

I didn't buy a mic today as I called Dub and he says the mic I use for the minidisk should work fine.

[millring]

I'm going to look into PalTalk. I think that the more people are in the room, the more the sound gets distorted. As I remember PalTalk, this wasn't a factor.

With Paltalk only one person can talk/play at a time, but the sound was pretty good. And while the one is playing or talking, the others in the room can "chat" using their keypads. And the amount of people in the room isn't limited.

Paltalk is really quite good for online concerts.

I'll look into it a bit.

[knobtwister]

I'm late catching up on this topic so let me get this right. You guys are basically doing a conference call on Skype with headphones, mics and unplugged guitars? And you can all talk and hear at the same time (full-duplex). And it doesn't fall apart until there are 4+ users?

I'm impressed. I design gigadollar audio conferencing systems and connecting 4 sites requires some serious audio processing and in actual practice some gating (half-duplex). But then I usually can't get the board of directors to wear headphones either.

Are you just setting up a mic for voice and guitar?

If that's the case headset mics and plugged in guitars would probably work a whole lot better.

How bad is the latency, delay?

Tell me more.

Don

[millring]

Actually, Don, we're finding out exactly what you describe. At first we thought we had gold because when we would test it out two at a time, we had really good results. Which means that it's still great for pairs and for sharing in the "Songwriting" forum.

But it really only takes four in a room before there's too much distortion.

That's why I'm going to check out PalTalk. As you suggest, because PalTalk only allows one mic open at a time, the sound doesn't suffer so much and the room size can go WAY up.

[Village Idiot]

I found my mic, will do the test, etc., tomorrow. Except by the time I get there, it sounds like it'll be time to abandon it and move on to pal talk.

Two questions about skypes: Can I log on from a different computer? How do they make their money?

[Village Idiot]

Nevermind the first question. Just figured that one out.

[knobtwister]

Mill does the distortion sound like a bad cell phone call or does the echo increase? Are you using a mic for both voice and guitar?

If you have mics that also 'hear' the room you're in, all of the connected rooms acoustics are added together. There's likely some echo-cancellation software running where Skype is bridging the call but it can't cope with 4+ mics in 4+ different rooms. But judging by what you've managed so far very closed miced vocals and direct guitars might work with up to 4-5 folks.

Pal talk sounds like it would work for song circle kind of thing.

I'm very interested in where this might lead.

Don

[iamjohnne]

At the Skype thing there is a chatroom, but I could not tell if it was audio or just text.
The sound was not bad until there were 4 of us, and it sounded to me like a breaking up cell phone in a tunnel. If that makes any sense at all; I had to drop off because my two year old grandson was taking advantage of the situation. He pulled all the books off my bookshelf. I will be glad when he grows out of the stage he just grew into.

[Deleted]

Glad, but a little bit wistful maybe. They're pesky though.

[chak]

Don,
I would say that full duplex communications begin to start falling apart with 3 users. Towards the end of our test run today only Evan, John and I were left. I thought that worked well for about 85-90% of the time but there were occasional drops.

A couple of nights ago, Doug Young and I tried playing the guitar together and it wasn't as successful from my perspective. I think there is enough unpredictability in the internet connectivity to cause havoc once in awhile.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the comment about all the mics picking up the acoustics of all the rooms. We tried to have folks who weren't playing to mute their mics to see if that would help the problem with mixed results I think.

Paltalk might be the ticket, so stay tuned for the next experiment....

Chak