I was asked a few questions about Hearme during the Llanstock gathering and felt that it may be useful to post this.

Hearme is a voice communication program that has become very popular with Mudcatters and the room provided by Aine here is regularly used for song circles by Mudcatters world wide. Anyone can start off a session and this is often done by creating a thread in Mudcat to inform others that someone is in their waiting for some company. There is a separate Mudcat Concert room on Aine's page which is fairly new and has been used by individuals to give a performance of say around 50 minutes. Big Chuck is maintaining a schedule for this room so if anyone is willing to give a performance, send him a PM and he will put you in the calendar. Also check the Mudcat Hearme Concert thread.

The question of times has often cropped up but a Hearme even can occur at any time, it just seems that the American contingent are better organised than some of us say in the UK. If anyone wishes to start something at a time more suited to their hours, please do so.

Hearme does not require a high spec machine. Their minimum spec is:

Windows 95/98/2000/NT
500KB disk space
Pentium 100 MHz or faster (200 MHz recommended)
A sound card
Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, Netscape 4.08 or later, or AOL 4.0 or later.
Microphone (headset model recommended)
Speakers

but I believe people have got away with a lower spec than this if only to listen and join in with the text chat. Unfortunately, Hearme only offer PC/ Windows support.

The best advice I can give to anyone who has this setup and is running the required browsers is just to enter the Hearme room and see what happens. The first time you enter a Hearme room, you will be prompted to accept the installation of a small plugin and to agree to a licence agreement. This process is usually completed in less than 5 minutes but if you get a grey screen for ages, please be patient.

A few people have asked about mikes. As far as I understand it, people have achieved good results using cheap mikes and there have been suggestions that cheaper mikes have actually outperformed more expensive models for this application.

Another question is a means of holding down the F9 key to talk. There have been a number of approaches to this which include tape, toes, staplers, capos, etc. I have made a software solution available here.

Regarding problems, Hearme's technical support has been poor and it has recently been reported by a couple of users that they have not even received a reply. If anything does go wrong, it seems that one stands a better chance of posting to Mudcat and hoping that one of us can come up with an answer that dealing with Hearme themselves.

Jon