Hi Everyone!
A few weeks ago I had posted a question about other choirs using Zoom for doing virtual rehearsals. So far my choir has used Zoom a few times, and so far it’s worked out pretty well. Here is what we’ve noticed:
1. We are having some issues with the conductor’s PC mic picking up the piano. The piano can be heard, but itis a bit muffled. IF the conductor can find a good electronic piano, we might get better sound
2. If you are going to use a Youtube practice video instead of a piano, it will help if you download the track to your PC and have someone who knows how to connect the the video to Zoom for playback. There is some audio distortion on the playback when buffering occurs. That may be due to the speed of your Internet connection and processing speed of your computer. Someone will need to talk to Zoom about this issue.
3. We had some early issues with echos and latency, but apparently you can adjust the settings in Zoom to fix this. I recall there are some Youtube videos about this regarding Zoom also.
3. We had an issue using the free account features. I believe they only go 30 minute sessions. It will help if you can use someone’s paid account to get longer sessions. We also had to break our sessions into two 50 minute sessions for men and women.
4. So far our mics have been muted when we sing except for the conductor’s and the person handling the playback. It might be good to hear everyone singing together, but I’m not sure if Zoom’s audio features can handle that. Let me know if anyone has an answer about that.
Overall, I’d give this a “B”. It works pretty well, but some issues will need to be addressed. There is much potential to this platform, however. Don’t be afraid to try it. We plan on using this platform until this social distancing issue is resolved.
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